When it did happen, my ex-husband (let's call him Steven) had left with barely the shirt on his back -- and then, a few months later, moved to what I'll call the West Coast, in much the same way.
For anyone who does not know him, this must seem like a dramatic detail. What had I done, after all, one must surely wonder -- or who was I -- that I could send a man fleeing his home of so many years, a home into which he had sunken so much money -- and on which he had done so much work -- in such a hurry that he would have not so much as packed a suitcase?
Really this was a way of taking his own time in leaving, and anyway, he’d never been one for making a fuss over the details of execution before simply diving in and just doing the thing, whatever that thing just happened to be.
Apparently this is a trait I have perhaps been subconsciously drawn to somehow more than once, as I found out just a few months ago that my very first boyfriend ever, also divorced now, had recently quit his job and left for India, and then that very same phrase, “with little more than the shirt on his back.”
In my own defense, I would say that in Steven’s case it felt a little more like an instance of a young man going off to college and leaving his room intact to collect dust. (I admit, I, myself, am guilty of having done this all of those years ago, and the thought of seeing that old room of mine over the upcoming holidays, the way I left it, knowing what I know about bedbugs now, is almost more than I can stand. I think of the dressers full of clothes and the scraps of papers in the desk drawer, the cardboard boxes in the closet). Steven’s things were all over his hoarder mother’s house in another city too, and even before our fallout, it had annoyed me whenever he made reference to being upset at his mother for her having often forgotten to mention pieces of mail that he deliberately was still having sent to her address despite not having lived there in years. I remember the feeling that the way he left a closet packed full of things and continued to even receive some of his own personal important bills here left me feeling insulted, some mother he had outgrown.
I like to think of myself as having the type of metaphorical mind that can read history (or at least a story) in a single object – along with all of the emotions associated with it. All the same, though, my disinterest in material possessions makes me also profoundly pragmatic (and thus often completely unsentimental) about objects that belonged to my ex-husband.
Had they annoyed me? Sure. Had they taken up space? Did most of them seem like broken-down, useless pieces of garbage? Certainly. At moments when I was already feeling irritable, it was possible that the sight of the rusty meat grinder that Steven had bought at a garage sale, for instance, now collecting dust in the kitchen, would send me into a minor rage. But as for sadness, even when I was still having moments of missing him terribly, I don’t believe I’d shed a single tear over his big, heavy shoes with the broken laces, or even the copy of the book I’d given to him for his birthday at the beginning of our relationship. Certainly not a meat grinder.
All the same, largely to quiet the annoying insistence on the part of some of my friends – that it was presumable impossible to get over someone whose stuff was still surrounding you – I finally decided that next summer to undertake the task of cleaning his closet out.
And then a strange thing happened. In the process of piling the dirty mismatched shoes and boxes of old notebooks and old polyester blazers (yes, oddly resembling those of my absent father from years before) into contractor bags -- lazily tying them loosely shut before putting them in the basement, regrettably in the area that would be separated from my bed by only hundred year old floor planks -- I had what one could almost only call an allergic reaction. I began sobbing.
But what was I feeling?
I remember how searched my heart as I blew my nose over and over again as though scratching at a rash, completely indifferent about what I was doing or whose things these were or what all of this meant. I searched, and I found nothing.
Nonetheless, I cried, and it was a crying that did not stop -- that would not, it turned out, stop.
It would not stop until I looked into the closet and could honestly say at last that there was nothing left.
