My number on the catastrophe scale right now? A 4.

Earlier I nearly hit a 9. I felt my anxiety spike in the car as I drove myself and Ex's and my mini-daschund, Genevieve, towards Brooklyn en route to Jersey. Generally I avoid driving anywhere near Manhattan. Whenever Ex and I visited my parents and took the expedited route through the city, he drove. I'd considered taking the much longer route that bypasses the city entirely, but in the end I made it back to the apartment via New York City, and both Genevieve and I are intact.

Of course, it wasn't really the driving that tore at my nerves. It was the thought of returning to the apartment and seeing Ex for the first time after my week-long stay with my parents on Long Island. I called him from the car just as I was approaching our building. When I arrived, I managed to maneuver the car between two enormous snowbanks into something resembling a parking space. Ex met me outside, dressed in a hoodie and sweatpants. He carried my bags into the building and upstairs. I freed the dog from her crate and carried her inside behind him, lugging my suitcase in tow. I set the dog down in the apartment, Ex disappeared to move the car into something more closely resembling a (legal) parking space, and I stood in the apartment alone for a moment, my anxiety-meter twitching between a 7 and an 8.

I unpacked. I unpacked for what seemed like forever. Gradually the unpacking turned into separating and reorganizing. The two duvets in my closet? - his. Those towels? - his. These extra sheets and pillowcases? - his. The swimming trunks he gave me because I never managed to buy my own pair? The baseball t-shirt I "borrowed" from him because I decided it looked better on me and was more my style than his?

The duvets, towels, and sheets now sit in a small, neatly folded pile against the wall in the long hallway that snakes through the apartment. The swimming trucks and t-shirt are sitting on his desk chair in the bedroom - now his room. My parents lent me an air mattress. I'll be sleeping on it in this room, the den/office - my room.

As I continued separating my belongings from his, Ex was apparently doing the same. He called me into the kitchen - the room with the highest concentration of mixed belongings, along with the bathroom - and took notes in a spiral notebook as we surveyed and sorted. The coffee-maker - mine. The pots and pans - most of them mine, except for any rogue cookery that wasn't part of the set my parents bought for us. The food in the pantry - his. The refrigerator - mine. The table and chairs - mine. Etcetera, etcetera.

I returned to my own organizing and dividing. The more items I pulled and sorted, the more questions about the breakup I had. Why do you want this? What are you feeling? What reasons could possibly drive you to end a 12-year relationship without working harder, trying harder, to make it work? When he told me he wanted to separate, I asked these and other questions out loud. Afterwards I swore I wouldn't ask them again. I knew no matter how Ex responded, his answers would never seem correct. But I asked him again anyway, first on the night before we left New Jersey to stay with our respective families and again this afternoon.

I couldn't stop myself. The questions were pushing at me, demanding to be answered. Maybe this time I could get him to say something truly meaningful, something besides "we're different" and "I think it's time to move on."

No.

He said some new things, but nothing truly meaningful, nothing that would have given me what I wanted. Reassurance. Validation. The more we talked, the more I realized I wanted us to be together. I'm sure he realized this too. Perhaps some part of him wanted to reassure me, to validate my hopes, but...

(I just paused to smoke a cigarette out the kitchen window and spotted Ex sitting on the floor in his room, elbow on his desk chair in arm-wrestling pose, observing his own bicep as he pinched a tape measure around it. He's been "working out like crazy" after all. Maybe I give him too much credit?)