jumbled

I moved out of my home the day after graduating from high school; do not mistake this for the symbolic beginning of a hero’s journey. I was not the reluctant youth, wearing an air of innocence as I nobly shouldered a burden that could not be comprehended at such an age. There has been no journey; I have toiled fruitlessly to bury this weightless burden; I am not innocent, and I did nothing nobly that day. Instead I cried, bitter, silent and motionless in my father’s car as the world moved around me, refusing out of enmity or perhaps embarrassment to meet my mother’s welling eyes, thus denying her what at the time would have been a sign of frailty, a simple ‘I love you.’ Instead, she stood in the driveway for twenty-minutes after we left, watching the street corner, willing a return and a warm embrace. Of course, I know nothing of this; I did not watch her fade into the artificial distance of the side mirror, and we have never spoken of what happened in the minutes after I left. But sometimes I dream, and the seeming omniscience has withered my childish envy of God.

Minutes before I cried, I finished packing the last of my belongings into my father’s car. “It all fit,” he said.

I thought I nodded, or intended to, and I scanned the cardboard and plastic storage containers that were jumbled into the station wagon, occupying trunk and back seat with various odds and ends, jumbled yet somehow orderly.

“I told you it would all fit.”

Such a simple statement passed judgement over the entirety of my life: I fit into a station wagon, easily. For all my odds and ends, there I was, jumbled neatly, and still leaving plenty of empty space so my father could monitor traffic through the rear view mirror. I don’t remember thinking I had so little worth, but I’m sure the thought was there, somewhere.

I said good-bye to my dog before I went and finished packing myself into the car. She was sitting in the front room, which was void and no longer really the front room, just a rectangular compartment in a low, ranch-like edifice perched atop a poor embankment, surrounded by pitiful yards and an ill-kept herb garden; the room itself was crammed into a tractor trailer with the rest of the house, except for my room. That was mostly packed in my father’s car, a few odds and ends still laying by the tires in the patchwork driveway.

I say that I said good-bye, but I didn’t actually communicate any words to her. I came in through the front door and closed it behind me, wanting some privacy for me and my best friend. From the doorway I patted my thighs with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, but she didn’t lift her head to look at me; she only stared listlessly at the cream carpet as she slumped against the back wall. I went to her and embraced her slouching form, conscious now of moist blurs growing in my eyes. I kissed her on the head, and had I spoken I would have told her that it would be all right and I would see her in a few months. But I didn’t speak, only held her tighter and wondered if dogs were conscious of time. I felt brown eyes on my back as I walked out the door.

But before I parted with my friend, I wandered through the empty rooms and halls, unsure of a direction. Had I memory of a smell from these moments, it would be sickly sweet yet nebulous and indistinct. I might recall the carpeting as being somewhat coarse, withholding a warmth it once gave liberally, but I was wearing socks and sneakers, and honestly I was not thinking of my feet, or for that matter of the colors, scents and sounds around me. It was already a memory, blurring at the edges, fading and washing out, details draining into emptiness.

And this was not to be my final walk through my home; instead this walk was a first, a tour of a house of voids waiting to be filled, and for a time I imagined that this is what it looked like before my parents moved in seventeen years prior, before the divorce, before my mother decided to move to Florida and take my friend away from me. But in that time new carpeting had been installed, twice, the porch had been added on, back decks had been added and removed, walls had been painted and ceilings had been redone, and all that was once mine was either banished to memory or jumbled neatly into a station wagon. Others would fill these spaces, and they would not know.

I stopped in the back hall and stared passively at a corner where a seven-sided aquarium once stood, bubbling comfort and radiating a blue hue that seeped under my door at night. I saw it there, in my mind, saw the fish in their little ordered world: leafy plastic plants wavering with imperceptible undulations in the water and shading a sand castle that the water could not dissolve, fluorescent green and blue pebbles jumbled somehow neatly along the bottom, and a golden scuba diver who should have died from asphyxiation months before. The fish swam around and around and around, and I remember wondering what that would feel like, if they knew they were so easily contained in an infinitely larger world.

Before I began my walk, my mother met me in what had been my room one day before. She said many things, about packing my dad’s car, about her driving schedule for the next few days and getting down to Florida, about me going to college, and about growing up in general. I watched her speak, a gentle smile on my face, knowing that I was grown up and I wasn’t going to cry at all. I hugged her and said little, feeling that she was crying quietly as she looked over my shoulder and saw shadows of my childhood, though they were really silhouettes of tree branches swaying in the early summer breezes, and she probably had her eyes closed.

“I love you,” she said, “and I’m so sorry.”

I shrugged, held a little tighter, and did not speak.