I had a lot of trouble sleeping that summer. It wasn’t just the heat, although that was mainly it. My boyfriend Duncan and I were living together at the time and things between us were tense. I had been accepted to Graduate school and was preparing to start the semester in September. We hadn’t really talked about what that would mean for our relationship judging that the school I was going to attend was on the other side of the country. I assumed we would live out the summer together and then part ways, but, obviously, there was something bothering him and he refused to talk about it. This was annoying to say the least.
Duncan had taken up a new and very demanding job about four months prior. I tried to be supportive but he became increasingly difficult to deal with on a daily basis. He was constantly moody, passive aggressive, cynical, and sexually uninterested. He always went to bed early, basically stopped wanting to go out with our friends, gained a little weight (just a detail), and got mad at me for not wanting to spend my last summer in town entirely indoors.