Sorry to See You Go

Fiction by David Obuchowski

There’s an email in my spam folder from a restaurant in Santa Monica. We ate there seven years ago on our anniversary. They’ve emailed me about once a month ever since. That’s dedication. That’s commitment.

For a long time, I didn’t delete the emails because I thought they were nice, unexpected reminders of a special, romantic night. Then, at some point, that charm wore off, and they just became unremarkable pieces of digital junk mail like all the rest. But I still didn’t delete them or unsubscribe. I suppose I left it alone because I had remembered hearing once, or maybe more than once, that of all the businesses in the United States to fail, the ones that fail the most are restaurants. So I decided to stick it out to see how long they could stick it out.

But how presumptuous of me to think I had that kind of time—the time to just wait for things that might or might not happen at some undetermined point in the future. I’d taken it for granted that I would be here indefinitely, or at least until I reached some very old age, just as I’d taken it for granted that our marriage would go on and on ’til death did us part. That was seven years ago, on our ninth anniversary.

Four months ago, you left. 

You told me you wanted to wait until Chris graduated high school, but you just couldn’t make it any further. To you, our son’s graduation, his going off to college somewhere, had become the tape stretched across the finish line of this marathon of a marriage. But in his junior year of high school, in our sixteenth year of marriage, after more than twenty miles of marathon, you were spent. At least that’s the way you explained it to me, in terms that I could understand.

I tried to change your mind, to rally you, to beg you to keep going. But it was too late. Maybe that would have worked a year before, or better yet, three, which is when you first realized how unhappy you were, though you never told me. But your unhappiness had since turned to misery, and the love was gone. That was when you told me your decision—when it was too late to do anything about it. 

As much as I did not want to accept it, I did understand what you meant. It’s one thing to cheer a person on, to keep them going, as they’re running. But once they’ve quit the race and are sitting on the sidelines, finally regaining their breath, the burn of the lactic acid in their muscles finally fading away, it’s too late—the race is over, the run is done. There’s no getting back up and finishing it.

I hadn’t always been a runner. But, for me, every hobby became an obsession. I suppose it’s one of the things that exhausted you. Before running, it was guitar. Just as you had feared and predicted, what started with a basic used Yamaha acoustic and a used volume of Mel Bay Guitar Chords had turned into a small collection of vintage Gibsons and Ampeg tube amps until it all got too expensive, and I got as good as I was ever going to get. That’s when I went from becoming utterly obsessed to bitterly frustrated at both my inability to play well and my inability to afford more gear. And so I sold it all. And then you waited to see what was to come next. And what came next was running. It started as a way to try to burn off some stubborn belly fat. But then I started running three, four, five miles, meticulously charting my pace and comparing notes with other new runners on message boards and social media apps. I was, as you could see so clearly, already devoted. Before long, running became my entire personality, and our family vacations were planned around running events.

That’s why we were in Los Angeles. I was running the marathon. I had run the Boston, the Chicago, and the New York already, and my big goal was to run the Colorado Colfax marathon in Denver. Not the most famous, but it would certainly be one of the most challenging, given the altitude. But before the Colfax, there was the LA marathon. I was intent on ticking off all the major cities’ marathons. I would feel incomplete, like an imposter, if I did not. Just like it had been with my guitar collection, I had an almost impressive inability to recognize the things I had—all I could see were the things I did not. It was like, I’d fixate and obsess over mid-70s Gibson Les Pauls or late 60s Fender Jazzmasters, but once I actually acquired them, they’d become invisible. They would vanish, despite their physical presence right there in my office, proudly displayed on tripod stands—the kind designed for gigging musicians to use when they were on stage. Instead, I would find myself looking at eBay auctions for early ’80s Stratocasters or three-pickup Gibson SGs. I couldn’t feel a sense of proud accomplishment for my completion of the New York, the Boston, the Chicago marathons. All I could feel was a constant awareness that I had not yet conquered the LA or the Colfax, and that any day, a fellow runner who I might interact with online would ask me what the hardest stretch of the LA marathon was, or how much of a difference the elevation made in the Colfax, and all I would be able to truthfully answer with was, I have no idea because I haven’t run them. And they would think, This guy isn’t a real runner. He’s just some amateur hobbyist. 

So the plan was for me to run the LA marathon, and then we’d spend the next three days in the city because our anniversary was two days after the run. That’s what we did, only I never ended up finishing the LA marathon. Something just felt off. I couldn’t seem to catch my rhythm. That runner’s high never came. I felt weak. And by mile fifteen, the thought of running eleven more miles felt as likely as running one thousand more miles. That was in Hollywood. I made it as far as the Farmer’s Market in the Fairfax District before I gave up. And I knew as I sat on the curb that I’d never run again. I didn’t need someone online to call me an imposter when I, myself, knew it to be true.

You were kind and told me to not beat myself up about it. You told me that I could try again, but even if I didn’t, nothing could ever take away those marathons that I had managed to finish. But I could hear it in your voice, I could see it on your face. A part of you was relieved to know this storm of obsession had finally passed, but you were already dreading what came next.

It was fly fishing that came next. But that’s not really the point, is it? The point is that somehow the restaurant in Santa Monica outlasted my hobbies-turned-obsessions, and it outlasted our marriage.

I remember the restaurant. Not very well, but enough to picture the interior, which was narrow but long, and a little too darkly lit. We sat at a small table by the door, and it was chillier than we both expected. I suppose we just assumed Southern California was always warm. I remember that we were disappointed they didn’t serve cocktails. I felt guilty about that. I never was great at picking out restaurants, but this time I’d thought I’d really gotten it right. Hell, they had a cocktail right in there in their name—Fox & Bramble. And yet, there we were, sitting at a table by the door, uncomfortably chilly, and we couldn’t even get a cocktail. You ordered a small carafe of red wine—just the house wine because you didn’t really care about wine, and everything else was too expensive anyway. I ordered a beer. As it was a special occasion, I decided to go for a fancy one. It was a saison. I told you it was really good, but in reality I didn’t like it at all. It was too close to a sour ale, and it wasn’t some twelve-ounce beer or even a pint. It was as big as a standard bottle of wine and I had as much chance finishing the wretched, vinegary stuff as I had had of finishing the marathon two days earlier.

I don’t recall anything else about the meal or even the experience. I couldn’t possibly say what it was that I ordered except that it was fish, but that’s just because I only ever order fish when I go out to dinner. Couldn’t possibly tell you what kind of fish I might have gotten. Arctic char, steelhead, salmon, rainbow trout? I have no idea. And I certainly can’t remember what it was you ordered. I can’t remember how you looked at me when we made a toast to our marriage. I can’t remember if we made love when we got back to the hotel. I want so badly to remember. 

But that’s to be expected—the memory loss. They tell me that I’ll forget even more. They encourage me to write things down while I can still remember them. So I keep trying to remember the good times, the happy moments, but many have receded too far out of reach. It feels like it’s the good memories that are the ones I’m losing, while the painful ones linger. Why couldn’t it be the opposite? Why can’t I slip blissfully—not bitterly—into oblivion?

I can still so clearly remember that, in the year before you left, I’d become even more difficult to deal with due to my migraines. They were agonizing and exhausting, and they took a toll on my disposition. I became moody and irritable and argumentative. If there was a silver lining, they put an end to my obsessive hobbies. But perhaps they also helped put an end to your patience for me.

A little after a month after you left, the nosebleeds started, and so did the seizures. The doctors had me come in for scans, and I got the phone call the next day. It was glioblastoma. Brain cancer. There were too many tumors for them to operate, and the locations of many of them would have made it impossible anyway. They estimated I’d had it for a month, maybe two. Untreated, they gave me two to four months to live. With treatment, ten months, twelve max. But, they conceded, the quality of that extra time could be quite poor.

In the beginning, though, I found it impossible to think about the diagnosis in terms of the future. What future? I would be dead soon. So instead, I fixated on the past. I tried to grasp and hold fast to the memories even as they slipped away, like spider silk glinting in the sunlight and hanging still in the air one moment, only to be carried off and vanish with the smallest movement, the slightest breeze.

“This is why I wasn’t able to finish that marathon.”

“What marathon?” my doctor asked me.

“Seven years ago. In Los Angeles. I’d run marathons in New York and Boston and Chicago,” I told him. “I tried running the LA marathon, but I couldn’t get through half of it.”

He looked at me skeptically. I hardly had the body of a marathon runner anymore.

“It was like I couldn’t get my body to cooperate. Nothing was in sync. I bailed out about twelve miles in.”

“Seven years ago?”

“Give or take.”

The doctor’s face went from skeptical to reassuring. “No, I can promise you this had nothing to do with that.”

I was suddenly furious. I used to be so even tempered, but now I found I not only had a short fuse, I barely had a fuse at all. “How could you say that so definitively? What do you think, I’m fucking stupid?”

The doctor cleared his throat, perhaps understanding that this was the glioblastoma talking. “Well, simply because we’ve never seen a patient survive with this, eh, condition for longer than two years. And, truthfully, two years is an outlier. In fact, it’s nearly unheard of. Seven is…” he shrugged in place of finishing the sentence.

“Seven is what?” I asked him, and now I became aware that I was weeping, another unwelcome symptom of the cancer.

“Seven is just not possible,” he said in a solemn and firm tone.

“But, it would explain so much,” I said.

He nodded. “When it comes to glioblastoma, we don’t understand most of the how and why. But we do have a good sense of the numbers. Seven years is not a possibility.”

“But maybe it was in there all along. Kind of dormant-like.”

He merely looked at me, careful to remain neutral.

“I got too caught up. I always have. I’d get so caught up in things. Guitars—vintage guitars, Gretsches, I think—and then running. I ran marathons. I—”

“If I were you,” my doctor interrupted politely, “I would be thinking about the here and now. Depending on whatever route you choose, we have a lot of options to help you get through them. Now, again, if you opt for radiation—”

“Oh no. No,” I told him. “No radiation. None of that, thank you. I’d just as soon live whatever life I have left, pretend I don’t have it.”

“Well,” he said, sounding and looking relieved at my position, “I don’t think we have to go so far as to say you have to pretend.”

And as if the cancer was taunting me—Just try to pretend I’m not here and see how that works out—I was seized with a blinding, paralyzing pain. Seconds, minutes later, the world returned, and the doctor said, “We’ll see if we can’t get you some pain meds, at least.”

I wanted so badly to be able to tell you that it wasn’t my fault. That all of my personality defects and behaviors or whatever else it was that made you fall so completely out of love with me were all because of the cancer. But you’d grown tired of me and stopped loving me long before those malignant mutations.

Not trusting myself to call you, I emailed. I told you I was ill and would likely not make it more than a couple months at most. I told you not to tell our son, not yet. I told you that I would meet with an attorney to make sure my paperwork was all in order.

You called me straight away. You were weeping. You didn’t cry the day you left. But when you called me that day, you cried harder than I’d ever heard you cry. You cried the way our son did when he was an infant. I can remember the sound of those cries, but not his giggles or laughter. I’m ashamed to admit, your anguish gave me comfort. It was the nearest thing I’d felt to love from you in years.

For most of the conversation, I maintained my control and my dignity. But when it became apparent the phone call was ending, I stopped you from hanging up with a desperate sounding, “Wait.”

“What is it?” you asked.

“Come back. I won’t be around much longer. But just come back. Let me die with my wife at my side, with our family intact.” I hated myself for asking that. But I would take you over dignity any day, no question.

You sighed. It was a long sigh, and then you spoke. “We can be by your side, but I can’t come back to you.”

“Not even for Chris?” I asked through tears.

“Chris? Chris is exactly why. First we split up—” 

“We didn’t split up. You left me,” I corrected.

“Then,” you continued undeterred, “we get back together only for you to…” but you couldn’t bring yourself to say that final, terrible word. So I did. 

“Die.”

You inhaled through your nose, and I could picture you squeezing your eyes shut. “Right,” you whispered. And then you cleared your throat and tried to get yourself back on track. “Talk about whiplash. God, it’s going to be hard enough for him,” and here you started crying again. “No. I’m not going to put him through that,” you said in a quivering voice full of frustration and bitterness and hurt.

And that’s when it occurred to me why you cried so hard when I told you how sick I was. You were crying for you. Had you been able to stick it out for only a couple more months, you’d have seen that there was no need for you to break up the family; the cancer would have taken care of all that for you. All that you did, you never had to do. You were living in a depressing apartment complex next to a grocery store with our son, who seethed with resentment toward you for leaving. And why did you leave? You simply fell out of love and were no longer happy. How unserious, how silly, it all seemed now, given the circumstances. 

If only you had known how truly close to finishing the marathon you were. The finish line was right around the next bend—you just couldn’t see it.



“Fox and Bramble,” a woman answers in a sweet sing-song voice.

The background is filled with the clamor of pots and pans and china and the din of countless voices.

“Caught you during the lunch rush?”

“Yes, we’re quite busy. How can I help?” she says. The conversations behind her seem to grow louder and I can hear raucous laughter. It’s a whole different atmosphere at lunch. People are hurried, still caffeinated from their morning coffee, some are trying to close a deal or, for that matter, open one. Not like the languid pace of the evening, where most couples spend their meals whispering and watching each other in the flickering candlelight.

“I’d like to make a reservation.”

“For how many?”

“For two.”

“For when?”

“Don’t suppose you have anything open this weekend?”

“Oh no,” she says with a chuckle, as if I’d asked her if I could also eat for free. “I can put you on our waiting list, but even then, I’m afraid you’d be about twentieth in line.”

I take a swig of beer and swallow a small white pill that’s supposed to prevent seizures. Then I ask, “Next weekend?”

“We’re booked through August.”

“Jesus. What month is it? I thought it was—”

“It’s May, and we typically book about two to three months out,” she says, and I can hear that she’s growing impatient with me.

“I’ll think about it,” I tell her.

No goodbye. No thanks so much for calling. No sounds good. She just hangs up. As if to say, The last thing we need is more customers.

I’ve gotten what I’ve come for. Proof of life. The thought had occurred to me that that the restaurant had gone under, and that it was just a zombie newsletter server sending out monthly missives for a business that no longer existed. The place that used to cut my hair, they did that for a full year after the business was shuttered. 

But, no, not just alive, it’s positively thriving. I don’t recall booking our reservation months in advance back when we’d gone seven years ago. A week maybe. Two at the most. Not months. 

Now it’s so busy that, even if I really did want to eat there, I realize that I wouldn’t be able to get a table until after I was already dead. 

I search for “Bramble” in my email inbox, and I’m presented with a full page of results. I open the most recent one, scroll to the bottom, and find the small text that says, “If you wish to no longer receive communications from Fox & Bramble, you can UNSUBSCRIBE.”

I click the word UNSUBSCRIBE, and a new tab on my browser appears with a page that shows the Fox & Bramble logo up top, and beneath that, my email address, and beneath that, a button labeled CONFIRM UNSUBSCRIBE. 

I click that button, and my email address, along with the button, is replaced with a message: “You’ll no longer receive marketing emails from Fox & Bramble.” And then beneath that, in bigger, italicized type: “We’re sorry to see you go.”

I put my hand to my monitor as if to touch the words, to feel their texture, their weight. But they are trapped behind the screen. Still, they are there, where I can read them, revisit them, reassure myself that I will be missed. Later, I close my other browser tabs, but I leave that one open. I do not want to forget such a sweet sentiment.

David Obuchowski is a prolific and awards-winning/nominated writer of fiction as well as longform nonfiction, some of which has been adapted for film and television. His debut children’s book, How Birds Sleep (2023, Astra), is a collaboration with Sarah Pedry and collected a number of prestigious honors. www.DavidObuchowski.com