Relationships • Breaking Up & Heartbreak
After They Left
For years, we forgot all about ownership. It would have made no sense to ask who owned the little vase from Kos or the foldaway umbrella or the guide to Indonesia (where we often went in the imagination and never in reality). It was a life of deceptive permanence, its material stability contingent on a succession of successful emotional moments: conversations in which both people felt heard, a sense of complicity, cuddles.
Now it’s the gaps that seize the eye. The house has become a museum of absences: that chair where they sat on the first evening (how shy we both were), the corner of the garden where we made the most of the hesitant summer sun and they wore the hat we bought them back from Portugal, the nails in the wall where their Agnes Martin print used to hang. Every time we think we may be over the worst, we’re caught out by a new object that starts to scream at us with panicked insistence (who knew a cushion could sound so desperate): ‘But they’re gone! And it will never, ever be OK again…’
Some days there’s an impulse to flee this emotional graveyard. At work, we can almost feel as if we’ve survived, at least for a few hours. But here, in what should be a sanctuary, especially at night, the pained history clings to every surface. The only way out is going to be eventually to lay down new memories, so that the sofa can be about something other than their cosiness and the bathroom won’t still be speaking (and torturing us with mentions) of their conversations. One day, someone else’s head will be resting against the pillows and another’s phone will be recharging by the night table – though (for no warranted reason) the thought presently brings on untenable guilt and nausea.
What unexpected rates of interest happiness charges. If only the sweet times had come with warning labels. We knew well enough that the arguments and lengthy discussions towards the end were awful. What we hadn’t quite understood until now is that these would be the easy bits; that as soon as they left, it would be the lovely days that would really start to torment us. Good or bad, simply everything seems to hurt.
There’s going to be no way out. It really will just take a certain amount of time. We probably have five hundred hours of mourning ahead of us until all those rugs, cupboards, cutlery drawers, bookshelves and pieces of furniture start to take pity on us – and might one day leave us free to think of something else.
