Moving out of the home I shared with my partner of 19 years.
It was only supposed to be my apartment while in college. I really couldn’t afford the fancy university despite saving a few years in the workforce. He relocated with me. We loved our studio. Lovely half-bay window, hardwood floors, a kitchen, a closet, a room, we could make it work.
After graduation was the great recession, I struggled to find a job. Our studio was rent-controlled, and everything else had exorbitant rent. I was working 3 jobs, and none of them paid enough. He paid most of the bills on his low-income retail job. We made it work. “Don’t worry” he said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
We got married, I slowly found better employment, but that rent control kept us in that tiny space. We make Thanksgiving work, each year filling our tiny space with loving friends and tons of food. A family, made of him, I and other transplants who found ourselves in our urban paradise.
I wondered if we’d ever move out. I wanted a bigger space, but our rent control gave us such a great deal! I embraced minimalism and decluttered every corner I can. He started smoking more, marijuana. Which was fine, our family/friends did too. We had evenings around the bong with lots of food, laughing, story telling, that close warm family feeling that is more precious than everything. I felt like I belonged, and it’s the feeling I had always wanted my whole life. Community. Plus I got a better job, I could save for a better place.
I pictured us moving out, I would empty the closet first of our stored memories, then pack up our precious wall art, most of it made by our close friends, our family during our warm social evenings. Last was our few essential pieces of furniture. Thanks to minimalism I knew exactly which objects I wanted to own and where they were at. The guitars were essential, it’s part of our gatherings. Our evenings full of friends, music we play all play together, and art. I am happy. A decade goes by.
He got sick and goes to the hospital again; it was hard. I knew he had this disease, a horrible sickness that ruins lives, but after 13 years, I came to rely that he would always be mine. Yes, he would get sick, but it was rare, and there were years of health, of happiness. He got better, but things had changed. He acted differently around the smoking. Somehow it became more of a priority; his doctor said it interfered with the anti-psychotics. He wouldn’t listen. I tell him it’s a problem. He won’t listen, a terse wall of denial. He lies, the drugs they start showing up everywhere. He says he will quit if I ask him to. I ask him to, he gets mad. I tell him I’m afraid of losing him to the drugs, to the mental illness, to him using the drugs to help the mental illness but actually they make it worse. I cling to my family, I cling to him. I make more friends, ones I can lean on if I need to. I pack a bag and keep it in my closet, just incase. I talk to him again, he gets better and we set boundaries around the drugs together. He says he won’t move, he’s to settled here. I know deep down I don’t want to live my life here forever.
He gets sick again and doesn’t want help. He lied to me about his medication, but then there is this. My stuff, in a pile, my friends on a Monday evening, rushing home after work. I desperately scour the trashed pile of my life in the middle of the apartment while he throws insults at me. I pass my things to my friends in the hallway who load their cars. They are good friends. The psychotic man inside yells at me, and I scramble to get as much of my life, through my belongings out of there as fast as I can. My diaries, my clothes, my grandmother’s quilts, the marriage quilt. I forget the Christmas ornaments I made by hand during those warm family gatherings of music and art. They don’t matter. He threw my guitar outside on the street and it’s gone. I take his acoustic instead, we can’t play together anymore. The pile, artwork from our friends has been broken. A certain hatred and anger surrounds the way he trashes my things. He talks to creatures that aren’t there and arranges the apartment to ward off evil demons who haunt him. He is angry, destructive, and scary. After 19 years of security, of trust, of him always being there for me, now there is a monster who destroys the entire life we built together. I know in this moment there is no way I can make sense of this, the cognitive dissonance of the person who cares the most for me, he does this now.
I keep going.
This wasn’t how I pictured moving out.
I am safe now. I move into a lovely new house with my friends who were there for me. I have my dream job now. He gets evicted and puts whats left in storage. He doesn’t pay the rent and it’s all gone. Wedding gifts, his photos, his pictures, his diaries, his sketchbooks of the amazing art I always loved. The only thing he saves is his electric guitar. He lets go of the rest, of the man he used to be, the man I loved, the man I lived with for 15 years, the man I married for 10 years, the man I loved for 19 years. The video tapes of us while we were dating, the art we made together, those sentimental beautiful things that no one understand but the people who lived them. All evidence of who he was, who we were, is gone. He stops going to work, he loses his job, he stops buying food. All he does is smoke weed, and one day he will be homeless. I look at local thrift stores, maybe some of those life artifacts ended up there. Maybe our old video tapes, his mother’s letters, my handmade holiday ornaments, our friend’s artwork that graced our walls of that former space. No, it’s never there. Why would it? That’s not something someone resells. It’s gone in the trash, with the happy memories he abandoned and the lives I lived with him.
I move on with my life. He chose this fate and I have to accept it. I can’t worry about if he is eating. I contact his family, and let them know I can’t care for him and they have to, if anyone does. I divorce him, I go to work, I see my good friends, I exercise, and I try to make sense of what happened to my life. I look at my lovely house with a view, how happy I am at my job, I hug my friends, I start new relationships, and slowly come to terms with the fact that I was happy, and he betrayed me, it’s over now, and I can be happy again in a new life I can make for myself.
I can make it work again.
But I still haven’t gotten over how I left, that wasn’t how I wanted to move out.
