Together Apart: Change is Never Easy by Lexi Maxxwell

(separately) who swore they should see it. Zach didn’t see what the big deal was, but he stared at the screen, smiling the whole time. Eventually, Sam had said, “This movie is boring” and Zach, relieved, had turned it off. They watched Three’s Company on cable after that, and the pizza vanished except for a single slice. The cordials disappeared entirely, after splitting the final contested one. Zach had, of course, insisted she take it. But Sam, of course, insisted on splitting. She’d done it with a knife. That’s how new they were; biting the chocolate in half seemed too familiar.  
    Since that day, cherry cordials — an old lady’s chocolate, and not something that showed up in their lives unless Zach put them there — were a trigger to remember that first night, and those first times spent together. In the first few years of their marriage, he’d occasionally picked them up as a surprise. Each time they would sit together and tell stories from that first night. The couch in Zach’s apartment had been an embarrassment, with a spring protruding from the middle, so they couldn’t sit close unless they were very careful. Why they’d never done the surgery necessary to snip the spring, Zach didn’t know, but eventually they’d put a rag over the pointy spot and learned to lie around it. They had shared many makeout sessions on that couch, then later on a better couch in the questionable apartment they’d moved into after tying the knot. Their neighbors in that apartment were a rather loudly amorous (and constantly drunk) couple on one side and what sounded like an opium den on the other, but it had been home.  
    Whenever they were in need of remembrance, Zach had bought a box of chocolates and they’d gone on their own drug trips, traveling back to the time when touching Sam’s breast through her shirt was something Zach somehow thought he might get slapped for. When the mere thought of touching Sam’s breast under her shirt had made his neck prickle with taboo. Even after he’d licked the cordial filling from Sam’s nipples a few times (he thought it was hot; she thought it ridiculous), eating the chocolates took them both to a time when they were strangers to one another — shy, innocent strangers who still had so many firsts ahead of them.  
    It had been a few years since they last had cherry cordials. At first, it had seemed like a cause — as if not picking up the chocolates from time to time was one of the “little things” that fell out of favor and nursed distance between them. But at some point their lack of indulgence flip-flopped and became an effect — something they no longer did because of the distance. Cherry cordials slipped into a kind of protective capsule in Zach’s mind, and seemingly in Sam’s. They were sealed off, set on a red satin pillow under a showcase spotlight, displayed in the most special case in their museum of early memories, sacred, not to be touched with their current filthy, distant hands. If Zach had picked up a box during the past year, it wouldn’t have felt like a tip of the hat to their past. It would have felt profane. As if they were sullying their most cherished and special of symbols, like using a childhood teddy bear to wax the car. The sweet, innocent days of cherry cordials and Breakfast at Tiffany’s were gone, and as the saying went, you could never go home again.  
    Things had changed, and Zach knew he could safely open that old vault and release the best memories from inside. He could feel it, and knew Sam would feel it, too. Things had been rough between them in the six months before and since the move, but none of their fights were cruel. They bloomed from the stupidest things: Zach would leave a full water glass on top of the TV; Sam would lay one of Zach’s books open on its face instead of closing it delicately with a bookmark. Sometimes, they fought about money, but it was always about Zach’s lack of worry versus Sam’s constant