Second Time Around

She closed the door and never looked back.

The first time it happened, the hallway smelled of burnt coffee and his cheap cigars. Same hallway, same stench, same cracked plaster shaped like Florida on the wall. She was twenty-eight, suitcase already in the Uber, driver drumming fingers like a bored jazz soloist. She left the key on the counter beside his half-finished crossword and a note that said everything two cowards could not say out loud: I tried. I’m sorry. Goodbye.

She told herself it was final. She swore on every god she did not believe in that she would never come back to this building, this man, this life that tasted like stale smoke and broken promises.

Two years later she was back. Same hallway. Same burnt coffee ghost. Same Florida crack. He’d quit the cigars, started vaping mango instead, but the apartment still felt like a crime scene she’d already fled once. She told herself people change. She told herself love gets a second chance. She told herself a lot of pretty lies while he kissed her neck and whispered that the past was just practice.

They lasted fourteen months the second time. Fourteen months of pretending the fights were new, the silences were fresh, the sex was reconciliation instead of muscle memory. Fourteen months of waking up at 3:17 a.m. with the certainty that she was trapped in a nightmare rerun where the monster wore the same cologne and called her “babe” like it still meant something.

Tonight was the night the rerun ended.

She packed while he was at work. Same suitcase, older now, zipper catching like it remembered the first escape. She wrote the note on the same kitchen counter, same half-finished crossword (he still couldn’t spell “quixotic”), same trembling hand. The words were almost wrote themselves because they were almost identical to the first note, just with two extra years of exhaustion soaked into the ink.

I tried harder this time. I’m sorrier this time. Goodbye forever this time.

She left the key again. She left the ring he’d given her six months ago again. She left the stupid mango vape on the windowsill like evidence.

The Uber idled outside. Different driver, same impatient fingers. She slid into the back seat and felt the city tilt, déjà vu so thick she could chew it. The driver asked where to. She almost laughed. Same question as last time. Same answer forming in her throat before her brain caught up.

“Just drive.”

He pulled away from the curb. In the side mirror the building shrank exactly the way it had before, brick by brick, window by window, until it was just another scar on the skyline. She waited for the relief, the lightness, the triumphant fuck-you-to-the-universe feeling that was supposed to arrive once you finally learned your lesson.

It did not come.

Instead there was only the sick lurch of recognition: the same song playing low on the radio, the same drizzle starting against the windshield, the same taste of metal in her mouth. She closed her eyes and saw the first goodbye playing on the inside of her eyelids like a movie she had watched too many times. Same camera angles. Same tear falling at the same second. Same hollow victory.

She opened her eyes and the city was already swallowing her again.

The driver glanced in the mirror. “You okay back there?”

“No,” she said, surprised at how calm it sounded. “I’m living the same nightmare twice. Exact same exit, exact same time. Like the universe is a sadistic DJ hitting repeat on the worst track.”

He did not know what to say to that, so he turned the radio up. Some singer wailed about heartbreak being a boomerang. She laughed once, sharp and ugly, because of course it was.

She thought about the first time she had left. How she had promised herself she would never be stupid enough to walk back into that hallway. How she had dated other men who did not finish crosswords, who did not vape mango, who did not look at her like she was oxygen and poison in the same breath. None of them stuck. None of them burned. She had told herself that was maturity. Now she knew it was just withdrawal.

She thought about the night she came back. How he had opened the door wearing the same gray T-shirt, holes in the same places, and said her name like a prayer and a curse. How she had stepped over that threshold telling herself this time would be different because they were older, because they had suffered, because people grow. What a joke. People do not grow; they just get better at pretending the scars are tattoos they chose.

The Uber stopped at a red light. Same intersection as last time. Same homeless guy with the cardboard sign that read WILL WORK FOR KARMA. She stared at him until he stared back, and for one insane second she wondered if he remembered her from the first escape. If the whole city was in on the loop.

Light turned green. They rolled forward.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. His name on the screen, because of course it was. She let it ring out, watched the missed-call notification bloom like a bruise. Thirty seconds later a text:

please come back we can fix this

Same text as last time, down to the missing punctuation. She stared at it until the letters blurred. Then she typed the same reply she had typed two years ago, the one that had felt clever then and felt like a death sentence now:

Some things aren’t broken. They are just done.

She hit send, powered the phone off, and dropped it into the seat pocket like toxic waste.

The driver was watching her again. “Ex?” he asked.

“Ex twice,” she said. “Like a goddamn reboot nobody asked for.”

He whistled low. “That’s rough.”

“Rough is temporary,” she said. “This feels permanent. Like I just closed the door on the same chapter twice and the book still won’t end.”

They drove in silence after that. The rain thickened. The wipers kept the same defeated rhythm they’d kept the first time. She watched the city smear past and tried to feel something new—rage, grief, freedom, anything. All she felt was tired. Bone-deep, soul-level tired. The kind of tired that comes from realizing your worst fear was not that he would never change.

It was that you would not either.

She thought about the life she was driving toward. Same best friend who would open her guest room without questions. Same bottle of wine waiting in the fridge. Same speech about how he did not deserve her, how she was better than this, how next time she would choose herself. The speech would be identical because the wound was identical. She would cry the same tears in the same order. She would wake up tomorrow hating herself for the same reasons.

The Uber pulled up outside her friend’s building. She paid, grabbed the suitcase, stepped into the rain. The door closed behind her with the same soft click it had made two years ago when she had arrived here broken the first time.

She stood on the sidewalk getting soaked, staring at the buzzer. Her finger hovered. For one terrifying second she understood she could get back in the car, drive the fourteen blocks, walk up the three flights, and open the door she had just closed. She could do the whole loop a third time, just to see how much worse it could get.

The rain tasted like pennies and exhaust.

She pressed the buzzer instead.

Her friend’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Jane? That you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s me. Again.”

The door buzzed open. She dragged the suitcase inside, dripping, shivering, already rehearsing the same apologies to herself she had made last time. The elevator smelled like old pizza and lavender cleaner. Same as before. She watched the floors climb and felt the nightmare tighten its fingers around her throat.

When the doors opened on the fifth floor her friend was waiting, arms already out. Same hug coming. Same tears, the wine, the speech. Jane stepped forward and let it happen, because what else was there?

Later, drunk on the couch, her friend asked the inevitable question.

“You gonna be okay?”

Jane stared at the ceiling where the crack ran like a lightning bolt frozen mid-strike. Same crack. Same bolt.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think I just proved the definition of insanity twice.”

Her friend squeezed her hand. “Third time’s the charm?”

Jane laughed until she couldn’t breathe, until the laughter turned into something that sounded too much like screaming.

Outside, the rain kept falling on a city that didn’t care if she learned her lesson or not.

She closed the door and never looked back.