Here Comes the Sun

On letting go of the things we carry.

The calm before the move-in storm.

They grow up so fast, Gabriel says with pride. A friend who helps me with all things brawn and power tools, Gabriel’s the man when I need one. He stands beside me in my new home, littered with ripped-open boxes and piles of trash bags. A tabby cat howls in the background, sotte voce. A couple weaves in and out of rooms with bleach and wet mops singing in Spanish. Here I am—the first-born who tumbled and fell out of the nest six stories. The wounded bird with clipped wings who taught herself to walk then fly. Now, I’m plopped on a sprawling rug shouting more? when I spy Gabriel wheel in cartons of books.

It took me four years living with nothing to realize the weight of the things I carried.

You have DVDs, he chuckles as I chuck them into trash bags along with the bins of expired spices and dried fruit, the tubes of red lipstick and expensive face creams, and the sheets that smell of mildew and cobwebbed attics. Who needs four sets of sheets? Plates that could serve a family of six? I hold my head in my hands and breathe because I feel overwhelmed by things I don’t need, never needed, but thought I needed. Things that whispered our girl came from nothing and look at her now! No longer does she have to buy chicken legs from bodegas and light candles when the power shuts off because the bills were ignored, piled up, never paid or simply burned.

A girl who spent a summer subsisting on bags of potatoes and butter. A girl who wept at the taste of a cheeseburger. A girl who once fixed Thanksgiving dinner on two hot plates. A girl who became a woman who remembers the privilege of a full fridge. The best days of my childhood was filling up a cart with Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and all my favorite cereals and watching the fridge bloat and burst at the seams, so full the light bulb dimmed. A woman who convinced herself having things means something although I could never really define what that something was.

But no tells you the hole you seek to fill is bottomless, unyielding, and forever famished. No one tells you no matter how much you devour you’ll never be full. You are not the fridge, you are not the pantry.

I tell myself this as I cut open boxes and Gabriel assembles my bed frame. For a while I’m quiet and perhaps he senses a change in the air or the stretch of my silence when he shouts from the other room—you okay?

I tell him what if it all falls apart. What if I lose my home because computers can do what I do but faster, better? What if, what if… until he sighs and says, can’t you just enjoy this moment? We’re both sober and although AA isn’t my game, I respect the concept of cutting up time into manageable pieces. So, I take in the plush Moroccan rug and the sun blazing in that seems to set the colors on fire. I take in the smell of clean counters and freshly-painted walls. I take in the taste of the take-out food I eat on the floor. I listen to the birds darting through the trees and the quickening of my cat’s heart as he watches them. Later I lie beside Felix and feel lulled by his breathing.

Then, in the middle of the night, I bolt out of bed. There are two green bins and one box missing. The box is filled with fancy appliances—stand mixers and waffle irons. The bins are filled with items from my childhood—report cards and diaries with baby blue pages because I was girl forever shrouded in blue. My diplomas from college and graduate school. Notebooks from college classes and drafts of bad short stories. While appliances could be replaced, the scrawls of a ten-year-old child can’t. It occurs to me that things were stolen from me, out of my storage unit. And I remember a day when my unit became “unlocked” for a few hours before I was contacted to replace it.

And my heart aches from the loss but the ache and pain of it subsides. You don’t take papers with you. There are no children to pass them on to. And I remind myself of how I’d wince when I’d see the green totes wheeled in wondering where I’d put them. I’ve lived over four years with things I didn’t need. And realizing this eased my breathing and I curled up on the couch and fell asleep next to Felix. Calmed by the steady rise and fall of our chests.

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