Little fool

Terry and Sherry, an old married couple from New Jersey, pull up to the curb in a green Chevy, smiling through their smudgy glass windows at me. Cool sweat graces my neck, the sun a blistering speck above our heads. I’ve opted to wait for them on the curb, given I am alone and want to be as safe as possible while selling our things.

I’ve had enough time to consider the risks. Now, I’ve made it easier for them to kidnap me, and the street is remarkably bare for a Saturday morning. All I can see are sun-stained vehicles that have most likely been abandoned and trash bins that should’ve been dragged in five days ago. These people could throw me into the bed of their car and speed off, and I reckon my screams wouldn’t even cross the threshold of the nearest house. How long would it take for someone to notice my disappearance? How many miles could they drive before someone cared?

I’m selling as much furniture as I can before my upcoming move, and I try my hardest not to think of the history there, behind every bolt and nail I struck into place last July. For now, I find a pleasant distraction in the couple’s matching pink shirts and Terry’s clashing blue trousers. Their thick accents help me place them before they tell me. In an instant, I feel safe.

“We’re on the way to the airport,” Terry tries to explain, watching my eyes take in their outfits. “Picking up our daughter.”

“We try to embarrass her as much as we can,” Sherry adds.

I tell them that’s wonderful, and I mean it. In their own way, it’s an expression of love. I picture her face as she steps out of the air-conditioned doors at Phoenix Sky Harbor, luggage in tow at her hip, and sees them. Her eyes would go wide, and at the sight of them, leaned out their windows and whooping her name, I hope she’d smile. I hope she’d feel grateful for the people who care for her unabashedly and boldly, because someday she might find herself alone on the sidewalk instead.

Terry gives me cash for my desk and my chair. I thank him and shake his hand, and I wonder how my former belongings will look in their happy home. Will their grandkids bother them as they try to work, crying and climbing into their laps? Will the black surface of the desk be covered in family photos, smiling faces from vacations or family reunions?

I go back inside and push the cash in my broken wallet, knowing the zipper will snag halfway down the track. The air conditioning hums loudly overhead, but it isn’t enough to mute my mind.

Lately, I’ve been backtracking through my old stories, and it’s hard not to feel as if some piece of me has died in the last year or two. I used to write about the world with a silent attentiveness, noticing people or things that now slip by me in murky gray. It’s not as if there is a problem to be solved here, but I can’t help raging for an answer, looking for the moment things went wrong.

This will be my fourth move in five years, and the result of that is feeling as though I have no home. My childhood bedroom was remodeled years ago, and any time I go to visit, my bed needs to be drawn down from the folding wall and reassembled in faux comfort. The sheets are unfamiliar and freshly washed, and the walls are too plain. As a teenager, I used to paint all over them, fill the space with my jumbled thoughts and hope it would resolve something inside of me. But I am 23, and it’s all the same now.

When I visit my friend Autumn in Mesa, and I step into her room, I can feel her in every item. I can see her laughter in the photographs, her patience in the little Lego sculptures on her dresser, her mind in the books on her bedside. Every piece of me has been bubble-wrapped and thrown back into the dark, marked fragile. Handle with care.

I have a deep fear that something is missing inside me, but no one can ever tell me what it is. Last month, when I read East of Eden for the first time, I highlighted a quote related to Cathy, a character who is often viewed as irredeemably evil. Steinbeck wrote, “Who knows but that she tried to tell someone or everyone what she was like and could not, for lack of a common language.”

I, too, have spent my entire life searching for words that do nothing to express who I am at my center, and the consequence is living on an island of my own creation. I see the same around me now, as I write this stupid article and try to find some absolution in my keyboard. An empty house, the result of my own naivety. New brown boxes, taped shut and labelled with Sharpie. Disruption. Recreation. A never-ending cycle I want to rid myself of.

I glance at the bookcase I struggled to move downstairs this morning and at the kitchen table, disassembled on the floor. I’d crawled under it the night before and taken apart the screws with shaky fingertips, splayed the wooden legs over the tile as I worked each section apart. I wonder where these items will go, now that they can’t be mine.

Some small family will eat breakfast at this table, I think. Their daughters will fill in coloring pages with Crayola, and the wood will earn new marks as they grow up. They’ll eat banana mash and stumble to talk about their days, where nothing remarkable happened, but to their parents, it will be, simply because they are there together. The bookcase will occupy some old couple’s office corner, and they will fill the gray shelves with the collection they’ve built over a lifetime together. She will lecture him on Mary Shelley, and he will nod with a patient smile, because he loves to hear her talk about anything.

In that thought, there is a glimpse of something beautiful, but no matter how hard I try, I do not feel resolved. Instead, I cry, and I let the tears streak my face because there’s no one here to pretend for. I’ll give it a month. I’ll pick up a fresh set of keys and book the U-Haul and muster up the hope that someday, I’ll live a life like the glimpses I imagine for other people.