He said I’m sorry that it’s not as nice as your place. She said it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that I’m here. She said I’m here for the company anyway, for you, because you asked me to be here. He kissed her. He said you don’t have to do dishes you know. She said it’s a way to get to know you. Interacting with your stuff. These are your forks and your plates.
She didn’t quite say but tried to say that however few things we have in this life they are – however fleetingly - of us and connect us to the world and to our bodies and to each other one tine at a time, one strangely twisted mirror image of ourselves in the bowl of a spoon after another. It’s the only real reason to have stuff, she thought, but didn’t say at all.
He understood, though. He said he’d only gotten those forks and spoons, those dishes a little while ago, that they weren’t really part of him yet and he wasn’t making a joke of it.
He wasn’t making a joke of her.
She thought about how much she paid for her place. Not the money.
Not the money.
Paid a piece of my soul that I’m only just now, just starting to get back, she thought. Paid with an absence of touch, with a near-cellular loneliness. Paid for it with a kind of pain that a man cannot and will not ever understand, not even the best of men, not even the men who really do try to understand. Paid a piece of my son’s heart that I cannot be sure he will ever get back, that I will never quite forgive myself for taking in the first place.
Like it was ever mine to take. Like anyone’s heart is ever ours to take. Even if we grew it inside our own bodies, even if in a quiet moment we could touch our belly and close our eyes and almost hear it beating inside of us.
She washed another fork, scrubbed another plate. She’d leave the glasses. She’s never really liked washing glasses. Contorting your hand into the cramped space at the bottom to actually get it clean, the fact that unless you hand dry them with a good cloth they never really look clean anyway. There is a futility, an awkwardness, a fear that something will get broken or hurt if there is too much soap, say, and one loses one’s grip.
Sell yourself short – and out – she thought, and the price to get yourself back is high. And I’ll keep paying it. I’ll probably always be paying for it in one way or another. The amortization periods for such things are always longer than one might think.
The acceptance of the debt is crucial, though, surrender to the fact of it a matter of survival – each payment one step after another toward thriving.
She washed one of his glasses carefully. She dried it carefully. She filled it with cold water and drank it.
Paid a lot for my place, for the latest place I hold in this world, she thought, and it is nice.
And he’s nice, she thought, and that is really what matters most and as much as I love my place, as nice as it is, I don’t ever – no matter how much nicer his place is bound to get as the years pass – want his place to be as nice as mine if he has to pay what I paid to get it.
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