Emu Eggs. Egg of Emu. Eggs Containing Emus.

The problem doesn’t so much as start in Portland as it does in Southern California, about eleven hundred miles away. I don’t realize it at the time, but my girlfriend and I are breaking up. One day we are together, a couple. Then suddenly, we are not.

It is early morning, and things are being done around the house. What at first appears to be simple cleaning, chores and the like, suddenly turns into all-out house moving. I don’t recognize the apartment as my own as such, but can tell that I live there with my girlfriend. Or at least yesterday, I did.

When her ex-boyfriend appears, there is also an abundance of cats. After my cup of coffee that morning, I head to the bathroom, where there is a short line of new cats, waiting patiently for their time under the hood in the litter box. This only strikes me as strange for a moment. I am in there on other urgent business.

It dawns on me in an emotion-less way that i am moving out, and my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend of old has moved back in to her life, and our former apartment. But we’re all friends, so this is more like a television show version of the same events than anything real, which is to say, painful but also remote. (more…)