Separation anxiety
I sold our bed tonight. I found a label on it that told me it was ten years ago that we bought it. The bedroom is empty now, bare but for a temporary inflatable mattress, and the whole house is starting to feel unfamiliar, with echoes that don’t belong and stark walls at once too bright and too empty. I’ve lived here for almost twenty years and I have about twenty days left to call this mine.
You find a lot of forgotten things when you tear your world down, you know, when you Craigslist everything you can, and prepare to make your house somebody else’s. A glove missing for years, hidden inside the dresser that went with the bed. A nightgown of yours that I don’t even recognize, lost inside a closet. An article I tore out of the Sunday Times magazine ten, fifteen years ago, about a restaurant in Oregon I thought I might surprise you with, a spontaneous holiday I never planned.
You left three years ago, and I’m only leaving through some momentum I carry after looking in the mirror and saying go, go now, just jump. I’ll miss this place, never have anything like it again. I’m thinking about this, packing up items in the kitchen, and say to myself that I’ll never walk in the same river twice; I laugh as I recall you mocking me years ago when I couldn’t recall if that was a metaphor from Herodotus or Heraclitus. One was a philosopher, you said, the other an historian, and I’d confused them. I still don’t know which I meant.
You also told me once, in a rare time that I opened up myself to you, that when you’d studied under someone, a then-famous and now-dead philosopher/novelist, you’d at one point confessed to him that you were afraid of your decision to move to the United States. Be afraid, he told you, only of those decisions that don’t give you fear. I guess I know what he meant.
