Stumbling in after a night of hard drinking, I noticed a distinct alteration in the sound of my footfalls. They seemed louder than they had in the past. More ominous, echoing as they were through the darkness of the room. The change was only discernable because everything else was unnaturally quiet, and that unnatural quiet quite willingly gave way to the stamping sound of my wet shoes on the dry tile and wood in the foyer. Faced with the auditory eeriness of what should have been familiar surroundings, I did the only thing that made sense. I took off my shoes.
Shoe removal notwithstanding, and despite the fact that the desired effect was immediate, I realized the situation called for more direct exploration. So, while I had astutely minimized the echo resulting from clad feet on bare floor, I had yet to discern the reasons behind the echo. Turning on a light would be in order, so that’s what I did, and so then viewed the devastation with which I was surrounded.
I had been away all weekend and knew she was going to move the remainder of her belongings out of the household while I was gone. Indeed, I had chosen to be away that weekend for that very reason. I could imagine few more depressing things than to watch her and the movers relieve the house of eighty percent of its contents. (Yes, nearly everything in the house was hers in one capacity or another.) So I chose to stay away. Given the option, who wouldn’t?
In a very real sense I knew what to expect when I walked in the door, but it was a matter of reality versus theory, and until that moment all I had was the theory. The reality was very different, as one might imagine. And so I found myself wandering through the nearly empty rooms, mourning the loss of the material things that had, until a few days before, filled it with style and light and gave one something to look at. That’s not to say I found the emptiness particularly offensive. Indeed, there was a cleanliness to it, an empty-canvas type appearance that was not completely unattractive. It was just that, I suppose, I found the scene striking. Nearly all that I had known and grown used to, material comfort-wise, was gone. What was I to do with this empty canvas?
Well, as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum, so I did what anyone else would do. I broke out a bottle of 14 year old Scotch and started drinking. It was sure that somewhere between the emptiness and the Scotch there was an answer to my dilemma and, sure enough, after the second or third ounce of beautiful brown fluid hit my stomach I found that answer. It was genius in its simplicity. All I had to do was move stuff. All I had to do was move it around to fill the holes. All those holes were just negative space waiting to be filled with something else. So that’s what I did. I reordered. I filled the empty. At least as best I could.
And it worked. Well, it worked for the most part. I could use the remaining furniture, books, lamps, coffee cups, and what-not to fill the empty spaces that used to be filled by the things that belonged to her. But there was a problem. As much as she had worked to erase her existence from our shared household there was no way for her to complete the job, at least not without burning the whole building to the ground. All around me were reminders of the life we had had together, and despite the fact that we both believed, that we both knew, that that life had, at the least, not been in our own self-interest, I couldn’t help but to miss it. Some part of me missed the stability of that doomed relationship. The knick-knacks, the warmth, the color were gone. I would not replace them. I didn’t know how.
And so it goes now that every day I come home from work and move something, even if it’s just a little. I move it to try to fill the empty space. It works, sort of. It works if you’ve never lived there and just walk in for the first time. It works if you’ve never seen it the way it was before. And it’s ok. This is change. This is moving on. This is all part of the transition from one chapter of my life to the next. I can lament or embrace it. My choice, of course.
In the meantime, as I decide which way to go, I can keep trying to fill the space. I can find a way to fill the now empty spaces to which I had grown so accustomed. Buy a lamp. Move a chair. Clean the floor. Have a Scotch.