N. Michelle AuBuchon
It starts with the television. You don't watch it much, so you both decide to give it away. You give it to your husband's brother. He picks it up with some friends and a van. You decide to give him the couches too. You bought them from a trumpet player your husband knew in graduate school. You moved them from Rochester, New York to Columbia, MO and back to Queens. The white leather sticks to your legs in the summer and the backs are so weak that they must both lean against a wall or they will flop down like an open book. It's time for some new furniture you both decide. Your brother-in-law has room in the van, so you also throw in the bar table and stools where you eat dinner most nights—a makeshift table you fashioned out of your husband's childhood dresser by removing the faces of the drawers, nailing them to the top of the dresser, and inserting boards into the space where the drawers once lived to make shelves. You remove your wedding china from the shelves before your brother-in-law and his friends haul it out the front door and down the apartment steps to the street.
"I've always wanted a big farm table," you say standing in the empty living room with your husband. "We could have people over for dinners." Lately, things have felt distant between the two of you. You still love him, but you feel there is a space between the two of you, or that you are suddenly aware of the space that has always been between the two of you. You are also increasingly surprised how little he knows you—how much of your relationship has been about him—about his music—about his journey. How could he love you, when you were never part of the relationship to begin with? Maybe if you could just reduce the clutter in your home, you could start again.
You devote yourself to the process. You don't stop with furniture—you clean out closets, bag up old jewelry, books you don't like, clocks, knick-knacks, old kitchen magnets, mugs crammed with pens and pencils, old shoes. You pack up a collection of wall hooks that you hung along the entryway five years ago—each hook attached to a letter of your shared last name. You box up old family photographs—mostly of your Greek ancestors at weddings. Their faces look somber—fearful even. Crowns sit askew on top of their heads, a ribbon strung between the crown of the bride and the crown of the groom. Your husband plays the piano in the second bedroom. You imagine a ribbon running between the tops of your heads—circling through the empty living room down the galley kitchen and into the second bedroom where he plays. You wonder if it is possible for a ribbon to go one way and not the other—like a river pulsing through the Missouri landscape of your youth.
That night you sit on the floor together eating Moroccan take-out and arguing.
He expresses his point of view. You express yours. You see him fiddle with his phone.
You ask him what he's doing as you dip a piece of pita into the large Styrofoam box of hummus. You are careful not to take all of the olive oil drizzled on top. You leave half of it for him.
"I'm recording you, because you sound so ridiculous. You need to listen back to yourself. You sound crazy."
"Ok," you say. Your voice echoes in the empty room—reverberates between you, him, and the walls. You both listen to the recording on speaker. You think you sound sane—levelheaded—clear. You have had so many of these moments with him, where it is impossible to meet—impossible to be heard—impossible to be seen. For some reason you keep hoping it will happen. You keep hoping he will love you.
The next morning, you wake up to him touching you between the legs again.
Before work, you clean out the kitchen cabinets: dried out spices, jars of expired spaghetti sauce, broken birthday candles, old tuna. You take everything out and wipe the cabinets clean. You bag up the trash with the take-out containers from the night before and place the garbage bag on the curb in front of your apartment.
When you move out six months later, the packing will go quickly—as if you had been preparing for months.