Packing baggage.

November 14th at 5:30pm, my new life began. It feels a lot like my old one. I understand the term baggage more clearly now. It has nothing to do with my three kids and all their things. It has nothing to do with the large, overstuffed sectional I often wonder about fitting into my future home. A home that will be much smaller. These bags are imaginary but they are as real as the birds who sing outside my window in the morning, the ones who shit on my car. They are full of self-doubt, self-loathing. They are heavy with distrust. There is resentment tucked into each one. They aren’t even sealed shut because I keep going through them. What do you keep after a ten-year marriage. What do you throw away?

How do you move on? A yard sale? Who wants my past. All the memories and the feelings to go with, I can’t name a price. I don’t know their value yet. I want to line them all up and look at them, over and over, tell people they aren’t for sale, get the fuck away from my stuff.

Sometimes I find myself back in the middle of those painful ones. I reexamine myself that way. I look at the way I was. I wonder if I could still make it right. I know I can’t go back and rewrite it. Memories of aftermath. Near the end, of waking up to see a door completely reduced to splinters. My hands the culprit. What have I done?

Fists through walls, through doors, into each other. Into each other through doors. Black eyes. Tears. Yelling. Screaming. Couldn’t pay someone to take those. Wouldn’t want to. But even those ones are hard to throw away.

At 19, I moved in with him. I brought a runner, a rug. It was a worn, old rug full of memories. I remember, at about five or six years old, watching my dad pull out the nails that held it to the stairs in my childhood home. Afterwards he vacuumed the stairs and then re-installed the rug. There was some sort of hypnotic energy there, watching him hammer the nails back in. It was loud and I stood there staring through the thick lenses of my glasses, my mind surely slipping into some gossamer, imaginary, existence.

I came home from work and the rug was covered in spray paint. It was a worn, old rug. In any case, my resentment was born there.

Hot and cold.

Muddy boots on clean carpet.

But then there was the laughter. We were a team, sometimes.

My art space going from a corner in the apartment, to a shelf in the garage, to Goodwill. Watching my own two hands hand over my easel. I was giving myself away. For what?

Then nights, after I put my kids to bed, spent together, dreaming up a future. Those nights gave my resentment pause.

There’s something to be said about simply existing. Quietly, in a corner, or on a dusty shelf. I became that coffee mug in the back of a cupboard. Nothing gave me more joy than seeing the door opening, the hand fumbling around, pushing me back further, but touching me. Wrapping its fingers around my handle. Pulling me out into the sunlight. Filling me, lips touching me. Using me.

I grappled with my resentment as it continued to grow. How do you stop something that is already in motion? How do you say it? I’m not happy. I guess, like that, you just say it. Well, I couldn’t say it. I didn't want to believe it.

I used to paint. Ten years ago, I told Andre, an artist, in his studio in a San Diego art district. A studio filled with the smell of paint thinner and used brushes. The familiar dry smell only a canvas can bare after the paint 
has dried for two days, even after a decade I know it. My eyes drawn to the background, a mug, one that holds thinner. I know how it feels, used and useful.

Only I’m not a mug. I never was.

The morning our daughter was born. We became parents together, there in that hospital room, I was scared as hell. He had taken a picture of me in the afternoon, the day before, my belly resting on my knees. The middle of summer. A young mom.

Memories of waking up in the morning to make him lunch and see him out the door. And years later, in a fight, when he told me he hated my fucking sandwiches. By that time, I hated those fucking sandwiches too. I resented him for taking them.

I resented the mud on the carpet, I resented the dishes in the sink on days when I was exhausted. I resented him for not being the friend I desperately wanted, the one I wasn't even being to myself. I resented the broken promises. I resented the false hope. I resented myself for hoping. I resented myself for waiting. Most of all I resented myself for being angry and for allowing my anger to cross lines that should never be crossed. My lack of boundaries worked against me and against him too.

I want to close this book and set in on a shelf and write a new one. I told him that in February when I knew I was done. I imagined I’d write a new one and he’d be in some of the chapters. But he’s someone I don’t know. And I am someone new too.

I think that’s the baggage. The memories.  

So, maybe I see these memories again, at Goodwill, on a sunny afternoon, a rolled up old rug on the floor, a mug nestled among the others, a book filled with words and a past. A studio easel. No more resentment, no memory of it. 

-M