The empty apartment

I take each picture of us down slowly. They don’t belong on these walls anymore. With each one, the parts of me that believed in the moments in those pictures get pulled out of me. Each more excruciating than the one before. They don’t go easy. Even as I put the pictures on the floor, those parts of me hold on. They hold on to the matte glare that shines from the prints and hide between the tiny cracks in the wooden frames. I let them linger. It’s okay, I tell myself. I don’t want to rush this. Some of these pictures are 16 years old. They deserve to hold on for a bit.

I move through the rooms. The living room is done - as painful as it was, I know that was the easiest of them all. Most of the pictures there were formal and not very personal. The dining and the kitchen are so much harder. The moments in the pictures here run so much deeper. The sense of taste lives in the heart, as do moments of cooking and eating together. Moments of tenderness and the parts of ourselves we threw into our food as ingredients that don’t want to leave. I need to keep going though. I can’t stop. As I take down each picture, I can almost feel like I am losing myself. This needs to happen, I tell myself. I need to empty these walls so I can be born anew. I cannot live within these moments that no longer connect to my future. But knowing does not lessen the pain. There is no anesthesia for this operation.

The bedroom is the hardest. The pictures here are private, the moments in them as much a part of me as my internal organs. Love was the strongest in the room where we made love, and in the delicate moments of touch when I defined who I am as a man and what I stood for. Who I wanted to be for the rest of my life. What I would do to protect her. As I take them down I feel hollow, an empty shell of an abandoned home that no longer has its master living inside. Each picture clings to the walls like layers of bone, as if held together by gravity. Taking them down takes all my strength, and then some. As I take my most intimate moments off the bedroom walls, the paint between the wall and the frame peels off. Some plaster cracks and comes off too. I am left with a light blue bedroom with white-grayish squares where the pictures used to be. I need to repaint this entire room, I think to myself, and I wonder if the new paint will even stick to these old walls.

I wish I could just move into a new house or apartment instead of doing this. I wish I could burn this entire place to the ground. Wishful thinking. It doesn’t work that way. I am not the man living in this apartment. I am the apartment. My bones are the frames of wood and metal that run through these walls. My flesh is the poured concrete and my blood is the water running through its pipes. If you look close enough, you can see my tears and smell my sweat - they seep out from the corners. My scars are the nail holes and the scrapes where the furniture hits the walls sometimes.

How hard my childhood was didn’t matter, or so I thought. I always knew who I was going to be. Nothing would change that. I grew up on Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movies, and I believed love could conquer the world. I still do. I always will. Nothing matters as much without having the one to share everything with. Every moment, every story, every dream. I wanted to live my life making someone’s dreams come true. Make their dreams my own. Build our dreams together. I knew that about myself from when I was a little boy. I just needed to find out who she was. Over time I built myself into an apartment with lots of rooms, and plenty of possibilities for the future. She would live inside me. She would own this apartment and everything in it. These walls would hold her, comfort her, keep her warm and help her achieve her dreams. These were wishful thoughts of an empty apartment looking to fill its empty rooms with love. I wanted to give her all the love I never received as a child, because what is love other than the love we give? For a while, that’s exactly what happened. She made me the happiest home alive. She took over the apartment quickly and filled the empty drawers and cupboards with hopes and dreams. For years, I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

Then we got married and she finally moved in. And quickly realized she hadn’t seen the whole apartment yet. She had only been to the rooms she liked, for over a decade. There was never enough time to roam around the place properly and see everything. There is a store room in the back where a big part of my personality lives, and some ghosts of past trauma lingers inside a moldy bathroom wall. I told her about them, but she didn’t care in the beginning. The unraveling took a few years, and when the dust settled, she realized this is not the apartment she wanted to live in anymore. The store room was small and took up a small part of the apartment, but to her, that room felt abnormal, felt cursed. That’s all she could think about. In her darkest moments, she could feel the parts of my personality that she didn’t like spill over the rest of the house like the thick suffocating smoke of burnt rubber. Smoke so heavy that it would cover all the pictures we hung on the walls for years; so strong that she couldn’t even breathe anymore. The moldy walls of the bathroom scared her. When she left, she left quickly. I didn’t want her to go at first. Her leaving would mean everything I’ve done for us for so long was so insignificant that one bad room and one smelly wall was enough for this apartment to not be good enough. The place that was hers all this time. How can that be true? How can the floods and hail storms I protected her from all these years mean so little? She moved out with what she could reasonably carry. I helped as much as I could. But no amount of help could move the hopes and dreams from the drawers and cupboards. Some things can’t be moved. Some things just die.

When the pictures in the bedroom were all gone and the walls were empty, strangely, I was relieved. I had built a beautiful apartment, with a strong frame, a good soul and room to grow. The right person would never run away from a one strange room and a little bit of mold. I had let the wrong one in, I knew that now.

I don’t like these empty walls though, I tell myself. The apartment may be empty, but it doesn’t need to be this empty. There is still so much love in my life. I am still such a lucky apartment. I have pictures I hadn’t put up before, put away in a box. Pictures of all the people who love me, who love this apartment. People who love me so much even after they’ve run their fingers over my scars and scratchy walls, and even after they smelled the mold in the bathroom and spent hours inside my haunted store room.

I put their pictures up on the living, dining and kitchen areas. I feel alive again. The smiling faces of the friends that tether me to this world and to my very existence. Without them, this apartment would crumble into debris. A few of them scream from inside these pictures to remind me how much they love me and how I will never be alone. Their arms reach out from inside the pictures to hold me, and remind me I am enough, and I always will be. Just as I am. Just with what I have tirelessly built my entire life. No, I am not made of the best raw materials and I don’t have a vault full of gold bars, but to the right person, I will always be worthy of living in. I will always be worthy of love.

The bedroom walls still stay empty, for now. I have to repaint that room. That’s going to take a little more time than the rest of the apartment.