Margot and I were about to host our usual dinner gathering when I admitted this arrangement no longer served me. I had resolved to end our friendship earlier that evening while browsing groceries at the Metro in our neighborhood. I’d filled my cart with everything I’d need to craft meat loaf, a dish I prepared every Sunday for these gatherings—our Sunday Loaf tradition. It happened to be Margot’s beloved meal, drawn from my mother’s recipe, a mainstay at our home. It felt like my quiet message: I want this to end, yet I’m still invested in how much I care. It only took eight minutes to stroll from the Metro lot back to the apartment. I wasn’t mulling over a grand revelation; there wasn’t a cinematic moment or a sudden bolt of clarity. It was simply cool and ordinary.
Outside, night had fallen. Women in athletic outfits walked their dogs, cream-colored goldendoodles trailing in their soft coats. Honestly, I wasn’t pushing for any deeper insight, just aware of the need to avoid stepping in dog mess. The air was stiff, rippling my mood; a melancholy settled in, even a hint of exhilaration at what lay ahead. We’d been hosting these dinner parties since I first moved in, not the previous August, but the August before that. It began with a housewarming. A few weeks later, on the first Sunday of the following month, I cooked meat loaf again for the same circle of friends, and in that simple cadence we forged a tradition.
Before all of this, when I had floated the idea of us sharing a living space, our friends offered cautions about how we might fit. She’s so type A, they warned. And you’ve just sold your next book—don’t writers need solitude to write? Still, the Sunday Loaf ritual had grown into a celebration of our bond: Margot and I always coordinated our outfits—merlot or crimson in autumn, blues in winter, pastels in spring. We decorated the apartment to match the season and collaborated on the menu. Yet the meat loaf remained the centerpiece. We both believed this was proof we were in this for the long haul. “This” referring to our friendship, our community, the fine china displayed behind the dining table’s wooden cabinet.
I aimed for a clean separation without entanglements. I couldn’t articulate a precise reason for leaving, and that uncertainty stressed me because Margot would demand a concrete answer. There was a void I couldn’t explain, and a quiet voice in my head insisting: it’s time to go. Yet I couldn’t confess that to Margot because I didn’t want to be psychoanalyzed. She would gently suggest I was “just being a poet” and then propose a meaningful vacation somewhere like Delhi. I’d indulge the absurd notion, get swept up in it, and maybe end up hopping on a red-eye to a meditation retreat, a gift she’d wield for years to come.
I no longer wrote poetry. It hadn’t paid enough to feed me, so I turned to fiction. I was working on a second novel that my agent sold a few weeks before I moved in with Margot. At the time, I had a finished first draft. Then, when I moved in, a certain something about that draft stopped working, so I deleted everything and persuaded my editor to pause edits, promising a fresh manuscript by winter. That deadline was a year ago, and I still had nothing. The publisher had to push the release date and remove the book from the catalog, which didn’t mean much to me since I didn’t even know what a catalog was. But I recognized I was in trouble. After missing the deadline, I barely replied to my editor’s emails or calls. The advance, the awards, the recognition at Toronto indie-bookstores—all of that felt like distractions from the real work. Not that I didn’t appreciate the exposure, but I yearned for a more secluded life. I believed I could write a small book and return to a quieter life of being, for instance, someone’s person. That’s what I did desire: intimacy, joy. And I wasn’t sure anymore if Margot was it, or if we were just one of those rare flukes that leave you muttering: fuck.
Here is the surface portrait I had of Marguerite: she was white, for starters. We nicknamed her Margot because she asked us to. It was a self-appointed nickname that became part of her identity. Margot, because she was blond and slender with brown eyes. Margot, because her hair had recently been cut into a straight bob, and her face carried an inverted-triangle shape. Margot because that look felt fitting for her. It suited her. It made her sound serious, a touch stern. She possessed wide hips, which she herself claimed were built for bearing children, jokingly calling them “love handles”—as in “love knobs”—and somehow convincing herself they foretold an easy future for birth.
Margot was meant to be a stay-at-home mom by now. Instead, she worked as a social-media specialist for a luxury bridal boutique, where she felt perpetually overwhelmed by other people’s happiness. For Margot, that kind of happiness bordered on desperation, and it gave her a certain edge. I was drawn to a woman with that kind of bite. My own mother carried a more intense version of it. As for Margot, she wore Lululemon almost exclusively. She had a sizeable posterior and tended to eat lettuce with regularity. She carried a YETI mug and preferred speaking into her Apple Watch rather than typing a text. It was easy to place her in Liberty Village, and I found myself doing the same thing to myself.
Margot’s inner struggle was that she was unable to convince her boyfriend to start a family. The boyfriend’s name was Ryan. I paid almost no attention to him unless he surfaced in Margot’s stories. The snag was that he showed no interest in her plan for children. Marriage felt like a blazing satire of capitalism. This lay at the heart of their troubles, and during the year we lived together, it became mine as well. Her job was relatively light, so she had all day to brood about her uterus, the mucus, the chances of pregnancy after thirty, and all the rest. I understood she was shouldering a lot, and it didn’t feel right to walk away leaving someone worse off than I’d found them.
Except that, as Eli had recently reminded me, I’d known Margot for twenty-two years. There might be room to renegotiate, perhaps even redefine the terms of our friendship. I wasn’t sure what he meant, and I never pressed him. Eli was Margot’s cousin. Yes, there had been a time in childhood when I’d been unmistakably in love with him. He loved books, was effortlessly cool, had taught Margot and me how to smoke a joint, and whenever we were alone, there was a certain electric charge. And yes, Margot had explicitly told me not to sleep with her cousin, so I spent years forcing those thoughts away. And then, one day, they just vanished.
Eli worked in finance, like many men in Margot’s clan. He possessed that large, orderly brain that made him feel like an older brother to both of us. He looked all-American: clean-shaven, blond, brown-eyed, with rosy lips. He checked in regularly, treated me the way he treated Margot. I could have been anyone; his kindness wasn’t personal, it was simply who he was. I was the impulsive one, Margot the dramatic one, and Eli the warmth—the steady, calm presence. He was only a year older, yet he seemed to know how to reel us back in. He stopped calling as often; he was getting married. I supported that. It was just that, without his steadying presence, something in me felt unsettled and off.
Our survival did not hinge on Eli, and it would be foolish to pretend our roles were carved in stone. Nothing in my life felt like a choice anymore. It was as if I had drifted into writing, into a fragile cohabitation, and into a particular kind of body—Afro, artist, atheist—and despite how extraordinary those labels could seem, what I felt most was the sensation of falling. So no, I didn’t have a single, clean reason for leaving Margot. I suspected it was a mix of things, chiefly the passage of time. Things rust. They deteriorate. The same could be said for relationships. We were eight, then twelve, then eighteen, then twenty-five, and so on. It didn’t matter. All I knew in that moment was that I stood still, resolved and unwavering.
I got home from the Metro around ten. I toyed with the keys at the door, the hallway enveloped in darkness. The place had green carpet that smelled faintly of air freshener. I felt both exhilarated and humiliated by what I was about to do. Our open-concept apartment was basically a single, expansive space with a clean island, a velvet couch, and a quiet sense of impermanence. It wasn’t unusual to return and find Margot in a robe, a face mask on, a bowl of popcorn, a bottle of wine, and two glasses on the table. I slowed my breathing, pressed my ear to the door, and heard nothing. That meant the TV was paused and she was likely scrolling through Instagram, overanalyzing her posts for the bridal shop. I pushed the door open.
“Hey.” Her voice came out singing, as if greeting a guest.
“Hi.” I answered.
I stepped into the foyer, then the kitchen. Margot glanced up for the first time, as if to acknowledge my arrival. I offered a face that said: So this is happening. I kept my expression cool, knowing she would sense one of my quirks. She’d often tell me I tended to shut down when intimacy appeared, but she’d give me a pass because I was “difficult to fix.” I disagreed. What she took as withdrawal, I saw as fatigue, a nuance I’d stopped trying to explain. She’d soothe me with “I love you,” which I appreciated, but I didn’t love her the way I used to. That realization had taken me a long time to admit.
Margot rose from the sectional, groceries in hand, and moved toward the kitchen, commenting on everything I bought—the strawberries looked exceptionally fresh, the yellow onions were better than the white ones, and coconut water supposedly contained natural electrolytes. We stood between the island and the stove. She talked a lot; I found myself fixated on the water faucet, which had been dripping for days. I had a backlog of Notes reminders to call a plumber—perhaps Eli or a pro—and the dripping sounded like a stubborn, goopy rhythm: glop, glop, glop.
Margot started recounting her day with meticulous detail. She could be prudish by nature, but with me there was no filter. Leaning on the island, she explained that her diva cup didn’t fill up anymore, which made her feel less like a woman. She wanted to know whether producing less menstrual blood meant she wouldn’t have enough internal nourishment to sustain a fetus. I didn’t find that scientifically sound, but I didn’t press the point; I pretended to engage with what she was saying.
“You’re going to bake meat loaf tomorrow, right?” Her voice stretched in that high, almost theatrical way.
“We don’t call it Sunday Loaf for fun just to be cute.”
“Yes, we do. We call it that literally for fun.”
“Asking what I’m making when I prepare the same dish every time feels a little redundant, don’t you think?”
She asked whether everything was okay, noting I’d seemed hot and cold all month, pulling away and acting distant. I asked her to elaborate. She said I seemed low on energy. I didn’t say much, just nodded. I wandered the kitchen, putting things away. Dishes on the counter. A cereal bowl. A spoon. A mug. I loaded them into the dishwasher. In that moment, the plan I had formed a few minutes earlier faded. A familiar longing—a fluttering heartbeat—returned, what she had called a “panic outburst,” the latest diagnosis she had offered, tying it somehow to a brief New York Times mention of my book. It wasn’t negative, exactly, just a small nod to a review that happened to mention my name and was pinned to the fridge. She moved around the kitchen island and stood beside me. Quietly, I asked for space. She started firing questions at me:
1. Is it about your deadline? Deadlines aren’t sacred; tell your agent or editor you need more time—
2. Is it about Eli? We don’t have to make tomorrow about his engagement; we can order Chinese if you don’t want to cook—
3. Is it about me? Have I offended you—please, just tell me what I’ve done wrong this time—
4. And what do you mean by, “I need space?”
For the apartment: legally it belonged to Margot, but the down payment had come from her parents, and my part was to be a reliable tenant and write my boring manuscript in peace. Margot couldn’t stand the emptiness of a newly built high-rise, and she had no interest in finding a roommate online. The idea of living together, she’d insisted, would benefit us both. In truth, it was Margot’s mother who had called and said they’d put in an offer on a two-bedroom in Liberty Village. Margot spoke up from the background on speaker, saying: Think about your situation.
We studied each other in silence for a moment, the private language between us surfacing in a glance. Then her expression shifted. Her eyes widened. She brought her hands to her mouth, as if to say: Oh, you’re serious. She moved to the living room, and I followed. She poured large glasses of wine and set the bottle down on the coffee table. We stared at the wine in silence for a spell. Finally she asked if the grocery store had been busy. She knew I disliked weekend shopping because the neighborhood filled with 905ers felt stifling. She picked at the skin between her thumb and forefinger, alternating with the other hand. I mechanically emptied my glass and refilled it. I knew I was supposed to answer her questions, but I found myself making a strangled sound instead. I told her I needed space. She started a sequence of questions again:
1. Is it your deadline? Deadlines can be broken, so forget it—call your agent or editor and tell them you need more time—
2. Is it about Eli? We don’t have to let tomorrow hinge on his engagement. If that’s too much, we can order in—
3. Is it about me? Have I crossed a line—tell me what I’ve done wrong this time—
4. And what do you mean by, “space”?
About the apartment itself: legally Margot owned it, but the down payment had been covered by her parents, and my role was to be a cooperative tenant and finish my book in peace. Margot wasn’t fond of the look of a brand-new high-rise, and she didn’t want to advertise for a roommate online. The idea of living together, she argued, would be beneficial for both of us. In truth, it was Margot’s mother who had called to say they had placed an offer on a two-bedroom in Liberty Village. Margot, speaking from behind on a speakerphone, suggested I consider my situation.
We studied one another in the dim moment, a private exchange in a private language. Then the mood shifted; her eyes widened; she brought her hands to her mouth as if saying: You’re serious. She moved to the living room; I followed. She poured generous wine; we set the bottle back on the coffee table. We drank in silence for a stretch. Then Margot asked whether the grocery line had been busy. She knew I avoided Saturdays because the area swelled with 905ers. She fidgeted with the skin on her fingers, switching hands, and I drained my glass again. I knew I should answer her questions, but I faltered, making a soft noise instead. I told her I needed space. She pressed on with more questions:
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t second-guess yourself. That woman was probably just racist.”
I offered a small laugh, noticing how she prefixed an insult with a determiner, as if labeling a single trait could explain an entire ideology. Grey’s Anatomy paused on the screen showed the character Arizona. The talk drifted to inconsequential things as we both drank a bit more and spoke about nothing memorable. Eventually her eyes filled with tears. “So, what’s going on?”
I owed her honesty, so I paused, collecting my thoughts. “I don’t think we’re really working anymore.”
“Like, in what sense?”
“I’m just not happy here.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I don’t think we add value to each other’s lives anymore.”
She considered that, the wine’s scent thick in the room, loosening me enough to speak more plainly. “You’re doing that thing where you speak in metaphors and vague hints, and I need you to be direct about what you want.”
“I’m not trying to protect your feelings, if that’s what you’re implying.” My voice sounded unfamiliar, almost confident. “I literally just said I don’t think we’re working anymore. I don’t know how to say it more plainly.”
“But what does that even mean? ‘Not working anymore’—I don’t understand that at all.”
Margot and I rarely fought. We tended to avoid direct confrontation, choosing instead to sweep issues under a rug or pretend they didn’t matter because we would forgive anyway. We were, in her words, “sisters,” “a family unit.” I processed most of my feelings through writing, while Margot had access to outside resources—a therapist, an acupuncturist, a private Pilates instructor—to handle what we didn’t address. I drained another glass. Margot finished her first. She sat with her legs tucked, leaning on the arm of the sectional. She reached out and placed a hand on my thigh, a gesture she used to command attention. I repeated myself, slower: I / don’t / think / we / add / value / to each other’s / lives / anymore.
“Oh, I hear you. I just don’t quite understand you. Say it plainly.”
“We’re always together.”
“Yeah, obviously we live together.”
“We sleep in the same bed nearly every night. I’m just so tired of it.”
“Okay, then I won’t sleep in your bed anymore,” she said. “No need for a big scene about it.”
“You’re not listening.”
“You’re not saying anything concrete, are you?”
I looked at her, trying to soften my face to seem fragile and nonthreatening. My voice grew softer: “I don’t want to say I don’t want to be friends with you anymore, because that sounds insane.”
“Yeah, that sounds ridiculous,” she responded.
“I want to, like, I don’t know how else to phrase it, but I want to erase you from my life in a sense.”
A silence fell. Then Margot began to laugh, pressing on my thigh as she did. I knew there wasn’t malice in her—she was simply seeking balance. “Are you trying to dump me or something?”
“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds a little… I don’t know. But yeah, I think so. I believe so.”
“Do you think so—or are you truly breaking up with me?”
“If we were dating, I’d say I’m breaking up with you.”
“Okay, but we’re not dating.”
“I know, I’m saying it anyway.” I paused to find the exact wording. “In my head, this was the end of a chapter, not the end of us; you know, like a good movie that ends, or if it’s a bad one, you press pause and walk away.”
She didn’t speak for a while, only looked at me with a mix of shock and awe, her breathing irregular. It wasn’t clear who cried first, but we both unraveled. It was that movie analogy that made me realize I hadn’t truly thought this through. Perhaps I’d hoped she’d cut the conversation short so I could say I tried. Yet a sense of relief mingled with a growing realization that there would be no turning back. I laid a hand over hers.
What Margot had meant by “my situation” all along was that I lived paycheck to paycheck. After the second novel sold, I accepted the invitation to move in. It wasn’t a vow of “Margot & Tania forever.” It was a practicality: I needed to eat. So I moved in, paid almost nothing in rent, and did domestic chores in return for not needing to face life alone.
“We’re not a movie,” Margot said softly. “We’re real life.” She pushed my hand away and walked off to her room. Her door slammed, and her absence hit me with a strange, almost clinical emptiness. The apartment suddenly felt stark, almost showroom-like. Outside, Lake Ontario lay in stillness, the city lights reflecting on the water, colorless and visceral from up high.
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From My Person by Téa Mutonji. Used with permission of the publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Copyright © 2026 by Téa Mutonji.
