Back to Reality

"The Only Way To it is Through It"

"If It Is to Be, It Is Up to Me"

"Git 'Er Done"

Regardless, regardless of the quantity or quality of quotations that sped through my mind like an LED message on crank, the task ahead had already worn me out and I hadn’t even begun (hence “The task ahead” – did you get it?).

Ha.

After eleven months and seventeen days, the time had come to finish what I had started. I had moved myself out that day in 2008, though at the time I was too bewildered by the handcuffs to think much further ahead, and now I was back to get my stuff.

Is it really your stuff after that much time has passed? The easy way - historically my favorite way - was to say
“Hell no it ain’t your stuff, baby! You march yourself outta here and get back home on yer laptop! Let another day get gone before you come back up for air. You need rest!”

Rest was ALL I had had, though. Since April 8, I had accumulated an abundance of rest, and I could hardly justify more bedtime even with all of the denial in the world on my side.

So, I put my head down and stuffed boxes. Since I’d only brought four, it was incredibly easy. The stuffing of the boxes has always been what I prefer. It’s a cinch, as long as you don’t ever have to take that stuff back out of the box and figure out where to put it next.

Pretty much everyone has to figure out where to put those assorted items next, though – like the empty, washed Bath and Body Works Ultra Velvet Cream jar full of brooches missing their pin backs, or the dried-out scented oil bottle with the tinder-y sticks poking out of the top, or the three trash bags full of action figures still in the original packaging so as to preserve both the value of the figure and the insurance that your child will never have fun with it.

After those four boxes were filled and hauled to my too-small car and three rooms and a hallway were emptied of all wall hangings, I was starting to feel panicky. I can only take small doses of extreme reality at a time after being exposed to lethal amounts of it for so many months, and I had already hit my limit.

I told myself I just had to get to the car. Then I just had to get to the house. Then I just had to get this one box in the house. Just this one box! Then another.

The third, and biggest, box started to tear down one corner halfway between car and house, and for several agonizing seconds I thought I was going to lose her. As I tried comically (it helps to think this visual could have at least provided a laugh to potential witnesses) to hold the box and will my hands to act as a patching device at the same time, I experienced a moment of extreme clarity which lasted through the rest of transport time:

I do not want to live with anyone ever again.

Ho ho ho, if it were just that easy! But these things I was moving, by and large, all meant something to me. They were chosen with care and a keen desire not to display anything tacky. They were gifts, or they were things I desperately wanted at some point in my life, and I do not, do NOT, want some future mate telling me there will not be room for the things that, in the end, have helped shape me into what I am.

And that is… what? My thoughts are relentless little bastards, really. I hate my thoughts! My answer is still that I don’t know who I am, but I am getting little clues, like this one, and, when pieced together with tiny bits of insight that have already stopped by for a visit, will slowly reveal myself to myself. This is my hope. So far I haven’t figured out much, but I know this much is true:

I don’t want to be married again.

I don’t want to stay in this place of complacency that has allowed me to gain 20 pounds and hide behind Mafia Wars on Facebook.

I don’t want to do anything that will hurt my son, and I don’t want to let my son walk all over me either.

I want to find a job that has meaning to me or will at least have something to teach me. Oh, and it has to pay money.

And finally, I don’t want to live with anyone. This newest insight kind of shocks and pleases me all at once. I assumed I would want to live with someone, someone very specific in fact, so the fact that I don’t is a significant victory.

This inner triumph carries me through to the last box, which is of course when something breaks – a tennis ball-shaped frame containing a picture of me, age 17, mid-backhand, during my final home tennis match in high school. My doubles partner Gretchen had given it to me at the close of the season and it had survived nearly 17 years intact.

Ah, well. Screw it.