The tiles in the bathtub are delightful. Nineteen seventies blue floral rectangles, used to be fancy. They are scratched and the caulking has yellowed and cracked, but the pattern is pretty in the steam rising from the tub. I slip the back of my head under the water and watch the tiles crawl towards the ceiling. I am eveopled by the water, and warm. The bath has always been a sacred place, somewhere where I was allowed to be alone, and do nothing. When having a bath it is implicit that during you aren’t expected to do or to produce, be good nor bad. Nothing is too luxurious to indulge, laziness is an intricate part of the ceremony. The less you do the better, the more you are utilizing bath time.
The sound of plumbing somewhere in the building echoes in my ears in that dystopian way things can only sound underwater. I point and flex my feet. I pull the plug and keep the back of my head submerged so that my hairline stays parallel to the surface. I stare at the tiles and breathe deeply, the air in my lungs makes me more buoyant and I float and sink with every breath until there isn’t enough water left to support my weight. I listen to the sounds of my bath water falling away through the pipes.
I’ve lived here for a month, in this cozy, overstuffed, one bedroom overlooking Parc Jean Mance. Since I moved to Montreal, six or seven years ago, I’ve coveted this real estate. I used to watch these apartments fly by me while on the Park Avenue bus. Through the trees, across the sports fields, and think how amazing it would be to live here. It’s as good as I imagined. Even though my balcony looks out towards the back of the building and not onto the park, I can see the reflection of the mountain in the glass of the office building behind me. I tell myself it’s the perfect amount of bougie, for me. The cross on the top of the mountain is barely visible, yet unmistakable in the top right window of a dental office. I pretend it’s a beacon, a star watching over me, not exactly directly, but constant and bright.
At night I crawl into an actual bed, on a bed frame (you cannot understand how glorious this is until you've lived without it for months) and my favorite part, there’s a window that opens right next to the bed at eye level. On my way to sleep I can gaze out my own glass rectangle onto rooftops, and treetops, glittery towers and church spires. I leave the window open and the fall air transforms my bedroom from slightly overcrowded and smelling of dinner to crispy and clean. I love a cold room at night. I bury myself under as many blankets as I can find and stack pillows all around me, under my legs, nestled up on either side of my body, lavender pillow on my eyes, swallowed up like in the bath. I pick the softest old shirts and a fuzzy pair of socks sprayed with essential oils and imagine that someday I will own silk pajamas, really fucking compfortable and fancy ones. Two! Two pairs fuck it. Face creams, face oils, face massage, there isn’t enough time in the hour I give myself before bed to treat myself to enough attention. After years of falling asleep in my clothes, without brushing my teeth, hungry, or overstuffed from wolfing down something, anything, in the time allotted to me, it feels as though I live in a new country, with new rules, under a new regime. Mine.
The years of people pleasing seem far away, I can't seem to remember them clearly. And yet I am exhausted by them, exhausted by the thought of them. No more early morning appointments to convenience someone else, I sleep until I cannot stand to sleep anymore, and it's working. This feeling, this unrelenting malaise of not being enough, it malingers but it no longer comes, from me.The constant unease about my ability to produce, to function, the buzzing in my head; it has subdued. It hasn't gone away under any circumstances, as constantly present asmy shadow, but it has shifted. It doesn’t come from me. Those stupid external pressures, not mine. Unreasonable expectations, not mine. When I think about what I need to do with my life; sleep. Eat three times a day. Exercise. The minimum at a job I don't hate. Spend time with people who teach me things and help me grow. Write megalomaniacle letters to my friends. Dance.
There is nothing that I need to do, or look forward to, or place importance on, as much as caring for myself and sleeping. Now there is nothing left to do but to close my eyes and maybe dream.
I don’t make appointments before noon so there's never an alarm to be set and think about missing. I fall asleep knowing that I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing, in a place made just for that. No eleven am check out, no tent to pack, no fire to light to make breakfast. No angry sullen man to disappoint and tiptoe around. In the morning the sun splashes the curtains with the cutout of downtown and voices from the bike lane and the football field drift up to the fourth floor. I get up when I am ready, I take deep breathes and breathe into the sticky, slightly sore sides of my body and fill the space in between each rib. I stay in bed until the water in my bones drains down to the bottom floors.
I picked up "the bags" from Spicely. Finally. The bags that we had traded an incoherent string of slightly flirtatious messages about. The contentious bags, that were of no importance to him and Annabelle, she’d said.
The house is so messy, he’d told me, Annabelle would never want you to see it in that state, when I offered to come and collect them myself.
My belongings, that the Spicely’s had kept over the winter, and the spring, and into the summer in their garage by the airport, were now stuffed into three large black duffle bags that I didn’t recognize.
Your bags had ripped, he’d said, I had these extra, he’d said.
I'd thrown them into the emptiness of my trunk and felt the hole inside me growl from under the construction I am currently doing on myself. My wardrobe misses me even if I do not acquiesce to missing it. Now that it’s fall I think of my wide legged jeans, and structured trousers and sigh. My beautiful collection of turtlenecks, cable knits. I know that I am not my clothes, that I am more than how people see me and how I dress. And yet, the feeling that I have, especially as it gets colder, is that I miss my furr. I yearn for not only my gorgeous things, but for my protection.
I want my copious blankets, the warmth to engulf me.
I couldn’t bring myself to touch them. The leftover bags from Spicely. I left them to toggle back and forth in the trunk the length of a hot and humid summer. Their stupid branded logos pushed softly into each other as I ignored them, their existence. Willing them to disappear with each left and right turn. Every pothole might launch them into oblivion. Every country song could erase them. I even left the car unlocked a few nights on a busy street, daring the universe to have these things stolen too, to alleviate me the task of dealing with them. Willing them to disappear, to change back to the way it was before. I wanted to fold my translucent wings and crawl back into my cocoon, to shed them from the stiff ridges of my changing, unfamiliar body. This was not how I wanted to become a butterfly. I want the comfort of my shell, to be surrounded by darkness and quiet, and muffled noises from the outside. To be a chrysalis again.
So I put it off. Put them off. Put off lifting them up onto my shoulders and carrying them up several flights of stairs. The longer I put off looking inside them, the longer I could pretend. Pretend that they didn't exist. Pretend that they were of no significance to me, that they didn’t hold the entirety of a past life that was no longer.
It wasn’t what was in the bags, but the opposite. It was what wasn’t. If I never looked inside them then I would never have to accept and take stock of what was missing. I could pretend, in my ignorance, that all was it it was, before. That all my clothes were hanging in my closet, in my home. Not stuffed in a duffel that once belonged to a traitor. I could pretend that a stranger hadn't taken from me every layer of protection I had accumulate in my short life. I could pretend that the angry man who threw things was just that, only angry. And away on business. Soon to come back now, sweet and bearing gifts. Soon to come back now to our house in Little Italy. To our home.
The longer I could put off the weight of the bags in my arms, I could ignore how light they were. I couldnt digest this yet, all the hours of composing myself, shoes, accessories, scarves becoming weightless in the mirror. Disguises, being all the versions of myself, playing transcendence, how little that means to anyone but to me.
The missing parts. You always notice when someone is missing an earring.
The longer I could put off my discomfort, leave the veil hanging between me and what I knew was true; that there wasn’t much left of what used to be me in those bags. That if I never opened them then everything that was missing might still be there, at least in my mind. In my imagination. Could, might, that the entirety of my life might still exist within the sides of a duffle bag.
I fail to discern the difference between gathering courage and procrastination. Regardless I was doing neither, poorly. I was playing make believe and it was working. In my mind, as long as those bags stayed zipped up, everything that had gone missing could be encompassed inside them. Maybe not the oil painting of the dog, too old now to play the way he was painted, or my mother’s wedding photo, but some other indelible essence of me. If those bags stayed closed then I couldn’t know what was missing, forever this time, and so the truth of my loss couldn't be hidden inside a poly lining. I'm even procrastinating writing about it. I don;t want to write the end. I don't want to tell the truth.
They were not, however, filled with even what I had been expecting; summer dresses, yoga pants. I had managed to think of my down jackets, they would keep me warm during the deep Montreal winter. A few other almost-discarded items, salvaged from the basement of what had once been our home would be nice. That little black dress that I used to love so much. I imagined putting it back on and looking in the mirror, wearing an old version of myself. Trying myself on. Maybe I'd like what I'd see.
Eventually, when I could not put it off any longer, with much coaxing and encouragement- fake enthusiasm about wearing said little black dress to a ball game in Pittsburgh that upcoming weekend- and some absolutely fabricated curiosity, I brought them into the living room and lit a candle (and downed a glass of white wine.) It took all my courage to face myself but for an instant I felt the desire to look at myself, take stock. Appraise what once had been and gently love and accept that. I did, I did want to wear myself, my past, I wanted to put on that old self for a moment and be her again. That younger, older versions of myself and see, feel, observe, what still fit. Fit my wings inside my old casing and take something indellible away with me.
The bags were full of Sanchez’s stinky workout clothes. Both of them. They still smelled like him, which was the worst part. I cried. A lot.
In the morning I threw them in recycling bags and left them on the curb. I kept the duffle bags, they are useful.
