"Re-infesting" is not a word.

Time, unlike other objects in the mirror, appears larger as distance accumulates. 


Thank God.


Despite all that I've thrown away, my relatively recently emptied basement floor is  already strewn now with one tied-and-sealed plastic bag after another. One might believe, upon a quick glance, that year upon year had already accumulated since the unspeakable had occurred.  And I suppose that that's deliberate.


A few of these bags contain kitchen items I have not been using -- some of them being bizarre specialized items that Steven had bought at Long Island junk stores, such as a heavy orange-painted meat grinder that I believe is missing a few parts. The hope of course is that he'll someday safely reclaim such things without tearing the bag open (and thus possibly re-infesting my home in the remote case that a bug might live on such a thing and for such an insanely long period of time).

My spellcheck informs me that “re-infesting” is not a word. If only that were really the case.

The other kitchen implements down there, clearly, I am not using. Other odds and ends include things like the pipe insulating kit I'd bought for my freezing kitchen, where the water has actually occasionally seized up on the coldest days of winter. 


But of course as I write this now it is May already and expected to be well above freezing for a very long time to come now, and I have trouble imagining ever needing such a thing again. 


I am startled by my on-going capacity to own things I do not need.

Mostly – and most depressingly – there are the books. Books I read ten years ago or books of Steven's that I'd hoped to one day read and thus selfishly had never put in with the rest of the things I’d planned to return to him. Cookbooks I'd taken from my mother's house when I first moved to New York or received as a gift from an ex-boyfriend or got from a friend that Steven and I had known as a couple – someone who was moving and didn't want them anymore.  (It has become an increasingly rare occasion for me to even toast and dress up a bagel, much less actually cook. Just when I I'd thought it was nearly impossible for that to become any more true than it already was, I got these things and began, for my meals, simply microwaving the frozen vegetarian burritos -- which were a staple for me at work -- at home, standing up for fear of sitting on the possibly infested upholstered furniture or losing momentum in bagging up every single item that I owned).

There were also the books that I'd bought or obtained elsewhere in the hopes of one day reading – again, many of those being books that I'd already owned for ten years. And having them all in bags downstairs in the basement was only a depressing and powerful reinforcement of what I already knew: I would never reread this book --  or even read that one. Life was always taking over, no matter where the most dreamy of ambitions seemed to want to take us.