Crumbs

She posts photos of them in D.C., attending a friend’s wedding: she and her husband, and their two kids. They mug for the camera, with the Washington Monument standing resolutely behind them. I know there have been storms, there have been set-backs, disappointments… Yet her husband stands with his arm around her, around his family. There is another picture of her in a shiny blue dress, dancing. A dignified family across a muddy, debris-filled river from me.

And here I am with the jumbled pieces of my life tossed into boxes, stashed into bags, pitched into the dumpster just beyond the downstairs door. Whenever I enter this building, the door clicks shuts behind me, followed by a hollow thud that echoes along the hallway. How I have disliked that haunting sound… I’m sorting through the artifacts of an eventful life, deciding what will stay, what will go. In the corner of the room is a pair of flip flops, a needlepoint stool, the tangled cords of a mute cable box. The morsels of a chaotic life that I am trying to pull together, trying to make into a quiet life in a cottage by the lake.

On the dresser is a dusty rag. I have wiped away so many things…

Earlier at dinner he says: You are back. And I wonder if I am. His eyes fill with tears and I pretend not to notice. He sees history and the blush of youth in my waning face--and I do not deserve the way he looks at me… We wait for our chicken and shrimp, the clear broth soup, our salads. The man in the bloated chef hat tosses egg, onion, pepper into the air, like the contrary bits of my own jumbled life; and then he taps out a rhythm on the grill with his chef knife, the salt shaker, a spatula. It’s all noise and motion to distract us—strangers and family alike—gathered around this grill. I sip a chilled Chardonnay and laugh as the grill explodes in flame. Beside me, he recoils at the sudden heat, this man who looks to reclaim a once-gentle life… The chef scoops portions onto our plates, and uses the edge of his spatula to scrape the extra bits of garlic, of rice, into a cut-out drain. Metal against metal. And then the grill is clean again, as if none of the chaos and flame had ever been there at all.

After I carry the last few boxes to the truck and mop these empty floors, there will only be silence and shine. Yet I want to leave some trace that I have lived here, that I have loved here, that my life once rotated through a whole year’s worth of living. But this Band-aid place did not claim even the smallest piece of me...

Tomorrow, he will come to offer me crumbs. He will set each one deliberately upon the table, and when he speaks, he will rotate each morsel for me to examine and admire. As if these crumbs were as sacred as jewels; as if arranged upon my table were rubies and emeralds, sapphires and diamonds—and not the quiet lint of empty pockets, a few dull pennies, a burned out star. He will ignore their hollow cores, their broken settings. His crumbs will sit, scattered, paltry, unadorned. Yet he will be pleased to have his say, to make his chary offering--certain that I will scoop these few things into a greedy pocket.

When he leaves, I will wipe down the table with a clean wet cloth and run the vacuum over the floor. And I will sweep, and sweep, and sweep—until my arms ache with the effort of it. Until everything is speckless, is empty, is disappeared...

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