“This house was so beautiful,” I said out loud from my spot in the corner of the living room. I was sitting on the floor, with the dog in my lap. My pants were covered in dust and dog fur. The furniture had all been removed from the house some odd days prior, and the holes in the walls from where the shelves and the photos used to hang were the only decorations available for viewing. The base boards and the hardwood were scuffed, and the windows were filthy, and all I could think about was how many Saturday mornings I’d woken up, and spent my entire day cleaning this house from top to bottom. For some reason the tiles in the bathrooms were the hardest to get the cat fur off of. A spotless house was the only thing I had control over during that time in my life and I clung to it like a safety vest in the ocean.
“I remember you not really loving it when we moved in,” He gave me a slight wince from across the living room.
“I didn’t,” I replied immediately. “I hated everything, then.”
I can’t remember exactly what he said next, but I remember it feeling like accountability.
I woke up the next morning, and I could immediately tell that he was awake on the other side of me. “Can you spoon me?” I asked, as I threw a hand behind me, patting around for his.
“What did you used to tell me all the time?” He asked rhetorically as he threw an arm and a leg over the top of me, “Give me the booty.”
We used to write and leave love notes all over the house for each other.
And even when we were struggling- we’d go days without speaking to each other, only writing to each other in a notebook, and leaving it out for the other.
Shit at communicating but, still trying.
I remember waking up one morning, in our first apartment together, to a piece of scrap paper on the coffee table scribbled with, “you are exactly what I’ve never had.”
I remember feeling so fucking proud to be his girlfriend. Below it I wrote back, “you are exactly what I’ve always wanted. ♥” and it lived on the side of our fridge until we moved out.
I remember writing on a piece of painters tape in our new house, that I wanted to be our dog in my next life- so I could do this life with him all over again, and I stuck it inside the hall closet.
He didn’t see it for awhile after I’d put it there.
“Cheesy!” He said one day with a smile, as he walked into the art room to kiss me.
I thought I’d torn them all off the walls the day I’d moved out, but here was one of them 3-years later, taped to the back of the bathroom door. Typed out on the typewriter he had bought me for my birthday one year. Or maybe it was one of our anniversaries. I thought for sure the house would have been wiped clean of Micaela by now.
“You know I put that up there, right?” I asked him in the backyard just a moment later, wiping my wet hands on my pants.
He nodded casually, “I know.”
Wild Little Hare 