I've been trying to identify the last time we touched spontaneously. Not a greeting, not a goodbye. Just reached. It might have been on the sofa sometime in November, your feet finding mine automatically while we watched something we've both forgotten. Or it might have been earlier than that. The fact that I can't locate the moment precisely tells me something that the moment itself didn't.

We've become very good at the household. The rhythms work: whoever cooks doesn't clean, whoever wakes first makes coffee, the calendar is maintained. We function. We have refined the performance of a home to something nearly frictionless. I read an article once about how couples in distress talk more efficiently - fewer words, higher precision, less redundancy - because they've stopped talking for pleasure.

I test us sometimes, small experiments I don't announce. I change which side of the bed I sleep on to see if it registers. It doesn't. I move a chair from one room to another and it stays moved. I stop bringing up things I notice - a good cloud formation, an overheard conversation - and weeks pass and I realize I haven't spoken to you about anything I actually thought. We've quietly sorted ourselves into parallel lives inside the same house, and neither of us has named it.

I'm not angry. That's the difficult part. Anger would be a direction. What I feel is closer to witnessing something that's already happened being slowly confirmed. I sit across from you at dinner and I love you with a kind of grief.

What would naming it cost? Do you sit across from someone you've known for fifteen years and realize you'd have to reintroduce yourself to be honest?