I am at home. I do not do much writing here anymore. After a few days away from the office, I let myself try to make this place feel like that word: Home. I don’t know if I can. This place, the space with its hunkering walls and cracked floors makes me feel a weight upon my person, a pressing of spirit from above.
It was better for a short time, when a woman’s presence made the place feel interesting. But she got tired of coming here, assuming instead I would make the 2-hour trip to her apartment, a place she described as “relaxing,” among other complete misnomers. The place basically had no furniture, no television, no movies to watch or even a radio to listen to. It was a long, large and not unattractive railroad apartment where the only reason she even had a bed was because a friend of hers prevailed upon her to be allowed to procure for her a bed.
The interior sparsity was on account of “the divorce,” it seems. She was never married but a 9-10 year relationship ending could certainly feel like a divorce. The dude took most of the furniture because he had procured it from his job in, I forget what exactly, but something to do with moving furniture from houses where he could sometimes take his pick of couches and sectionals left behind. So it was his before it was hers, though I don’t know how fair that is for her to be left with nothing. I still have furniture from a long-term live-in arrangement where I was given a set of shelves her family no longer needed, and we also procured a chest of drawers which, unlike the shelves, I never wanted in this place. But I don’t raise my concerns over matter of this kind for fear of the anger that would rain down upon me.
The relationship, if we can even call it that, ended a couple of weeks ago, abruptly and decisively. She wanted out and she got it, no questions asked, because I wanted out, too. What we had was unhealthy and nowhere near as good as we tried to believe.
We had a past, though. Oh, did we ever. It was about 30 years ago when last we met in person, but somehow she never strayed far from my mind or my reckoning of the women I’ve known. She was unique and nothing about that changed with the years. People do not change.
