With deft hands, tiny elves packed your memories away.
They filled steamer trunks with the biggest items – lies and rages and drawers-full of disappointment, neatly refolded onto the shelves of the stand-up trunk. They wrapped your most precious trinkets – your father’s stop-watch; an Army Ranger shot glass; two Waterford martini glasses; the gold ring you bought in Greece, a memento from a love you’d lived without me – in tissue paper, placing them delicately in the felt-lined tray compartments.
The vision of you in my bed, your fresh-showered scent, the scratch of your Sunday beard, the feel of your strapping whole-body squeeze enwrapping me, the sound of your footsteps, mornings of lovemaking, the future we’d planned, the inside jokes, the memories of the photos on the walls, the shine in your eye at the beginning, when you still believed – these were packed swiftly into cardboard boxes. Neat and tidy the cardboard cairn, marked “Love: Early to Mid.”
All the rest – words and promises and relentless arguments and sleepless nights and your icy blue stare and your disdain for me – was poured into glass bottles, taken to the ocean’s edge and cast adrift. Blue, green, clear glass, filled with smoky tendrils, each carrying a tiny, hand-written message for the ones who will open them on distant shores, “Love: Late to Gone.”
So efficient, these little elves, there was nothing left to take to Goodwill, nothing to put out on the sidewalk or the lawn, marred by the wake of you peeling away: muddy tire tracks and snapped lower branches of the tree on the planting strip. The end of love heralded, as it always is, by a white U-Haul truck.
I walked back inside. Closets and drawers gaped open, the walls checker-boarded with faded squares and tiny little nail holes, book shelves dusty and empty, an awkward first grader’s smile awaiting the push of permanent teeth. Relief flooded when the elves went to work, with miniature cleaning supplies, dust rags and mops and teeny tiny toothpaste dollops, cleaning and smoothing the holes in my cells and memory traces that once housed your essence.
Not that I believe in elves, per se. Or faeries, or sprites or angels or spirit guides or gods – any of the larger and smaller beings I can’t see. But something did what I could not – cleansed, purified, rearranged and released you, molecule by molecule, from the places you used to live in me.