moving out
by Marla
On a drizzly Thursday
afternoon Renee dutifully helped me pack my things into big brown boxes,
starting with the closet, then the bookshelf, then the desk littered with loose
paper and pens that no longer wrote, gum wrappers, magazine clippings, odds and
ends. On my nightstand there were novels I hadn’t read yet, and a bronze
jewelry box with my parents’ wedding rings, and a hairbrush already painstakingly cleaned of stray strands. Renee said very little; all week she’d been kind to
me, tiptoeing around my feelings, sensitive and maternal. Her compassion suffocated
me. I had always thought it would strengthen me.
“Do you remember when I threw a raw egg in your face?” I asked,
attempting to turn the somber mood into something else, something that didn’t
resemble a funeral or the aftermath of a catastrophe. “Remember?” I asked
again. She probably did, because it wasn’t that long ago. It was in the middle
of a Monopoly game, and she had been asking for it, trash-talking and cheating
all afternoon. The egg was for a science class experiment—an infant dummy. We had to feed
it, bathe it, watch over it, change its diaper, rock it to sleep. We had to
make sure it didn’t break, didn’t get lost. We had to keep it safe. The point
was to eventually reach the conclusion that we weren’t ready for babies of
our own yet, which most of us already knew anyway. We were twelve; it wasn’t
like any of us seriously considered otherwise. When the yolk ran down Renee’s
neck and arms like slime oozing out of a monster’s skin, she was the first to
laugh. I followed suit. I remembered how nice it felt to know that we were both forgiven.
We filled the boxes quickly with my things. In the corner of the room
there was a black garbage bag overflowing with everything I no longer wanted or
needed, everything my life could no longer accommodate. Every few minutes Renee
tossed something in wordlessly. I liked that she didn’t have to ask me whether
or not something was rubbish. She knew me well enough. Her hair hung down her
back in a haphazard braid as she stacked my sweaters systematically, folding
the arms inward first, then outward, then halving the body horizontally. She
arranged them by color, and at some point I wanted to ask when and why a
privileged girl like her learned how to do anything remotely domesticated. When
she was done with the sweaters, she took my dresses off their hangers one by
one, their soft fabric gliding over her small, smooth hands. In the empty
closet the bare hangers looked forlorn, as if they had suddenly been stripped
of value, as if they were waiting for someone that would never come. When we
were almost finished, I looked around the room. With nothing in place save for
the furniture, it seemed unfamiliar to me; already it was beginning to feel
like it wasn’t mine. Soon it would be reduced to a place in my mind I would
explore only when nostalgia hits, lumped in with stories of my childhood. There
was an awful lot of space, space everywhere—underneath the bed, behind the
door, beside the window, inside the drawers, next to the bed. I wondered why I
ever required that much.
It is an amazing feeling to know that you can connect with someone emotionally even during the lowest of times. You know you can always count on that person in times of need be it in any situation at all. Nonetheless, things change over time and change is necessary to enable us to move forward. Hence, moving out is necessary if the situation requires you to. It is definitely not going to be easy to adapt to a whole new environment but gradually and eventually you will be able to do so.
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