When I am empty please dispose of me properly
In the apartment we lived in, us three, the dirty dishes gradually piled up, reaching nearly as high as the stacks of books I had pushed against the walls, marking the slow crawl of time. Wherever I was, every minute would make its way on all fours across the room.
“Midnight’s creeping up on us again,” I say one day, my eyes following, first, the scuffs on the floor, and then the man in the adjoining kitchen.
Raf strolls to the sink and examines a blue bowl wedged neatly under the faucet. It looks like it calcified there. He pokes at it, but it won’t budge. He shrugs before turning slightly in my general direction. Our eyes don’t meet. “It should be 2 or 3 in the morning at least. On a Tuesday.”
“Nope. Still Monday.”
Raf’s head cocks to the side as he takes a seat, far, far away to my right. Then he straightens and starts to eat out of the takeaway carton in his hand.
I release a breath I didn’t realize I had been holding and sink even deeper into our couch, the massive one we had commandeered from the curb one spring. We had hauled this monstrosity together, crossing two blocks, laughing because we had no idea how to get it up the narrow turns of three flights of stairs.
When I say “together,” I meant Raf and me, but also Stanley, whom you always called Stu, and occasionally Stanley, but never Stan. Stu was carrying a large potted pothos at the time, and he used his free hand to push at the couch every now and then, which did precious little. Raf did a lot of jeering at that, but because it was he that did most of the heavy lifting, Stu stayed quiet, nodding in amusement.
Once we got the couch inside the apartment, it made the living room feel airless and oppressive—the walls looked like they were collapsing toward the center. Stu suggested that we get rid of the multiple bookshelves boxing us in. I really wonder why we agreed to that. But over the course of the week, mutual friends from university had taken the shelves, our books were left orphaned on the floor, and Raf had gotten a wet vacuum.
We only ever used that thing once.
I must say that it did freshen up the couch considerably, even though we had found it in pretty decent shape. I know I’m going on and on about a piece of furniture, but it’s the only thing I recall now that anchored us as a unit, especially after life started to fall apart.
The couch was sizable enough for the three of us, and there was always space left over. More importantly, it felt like a hug, the kind your entire body just sinks into at the end of the day, when you’ve slipped out of your shoes and clothes, when you’ve taken off the mask you wear in public, when all the names you’ve ever called yourself unhand you, and you become no one and nothing for a brief moment.
That kind of hug.
Anyway, Stu wanted us to get a settee.
Raf was offended. “Stu. We’re voracious readers here. We have terrible posture. We keep all sorts of odd hours for our ambitions, which are their own kind of warfare. Don’t you think we need a soft place to land? I mean, settees are for perching. We don’t perch, okay? We nest.”
These were the kinds of things we argued about.
To keep the peace, I’d cook for us. Raf would make sure that we had enough groceries. I’d plate our dinners the way the cooking shows said would look the prettiest. And Stu would do the dishes while singing. Afterward, we would crumple into our own little corners, prying books out from under other books, then re-balancing them with our hands, our elbows, our toes. We became adept at figuring out the center of gravity of almost anything.
But the books against the walls? That was my idea.
Spines, covers, pages—I’ve always had this yearning to feel books under my fingertips. Such a desire felt banal but also overplayed, like a patron touching his favorite sculpture on the sly at the museum, or an actor caressing ears of wheat in a field flooded with sunlight in some auteur’s film.
You’d always find one of us by the books, adding or subtracting from the stacks. They were like pillars in a coliseum, and we three were the show.
Did you know that our apartment with its beast of a couch and its bedlam of books was featured in some small home interiors magazine? I felt obnoxious and inauthentic during the photo shoot, vulnerable as if they had skinned me alive to traverse my soft, beating insides.
“Anyone can see this place is a mess. That magazine has no taste.” Raf nodded gravely. “Our chaos, our circus,” I continued. But Stu was delighted.
From the outside, we had the ideal living arrangement. Friends from school, of differing talents and temperaments, young, attractive if you didn’t overthink it, and had great chemistry together, as well as a deep fondness for each other’s faults and foibles.
Raf took maths but really came out of the womb an engineer. Stu was the artist and the actor. I wrote. Not nearly as much as I read, but I had made my peace with that.
The romance of our friendship felt sturdy enough, certainly, but only if we were complete, a table with three legs on a level surface. Being alone was out of the question, and being in love felt inconceivable, even if it was with any of them. There was no tiptoeing to anybody’s rooms, and if Raf or Stu had struck a chord in one another at some point, the creak of the floorboards would’ve given them away.
I think we were all just on the same orbit, designed to never collide, throwing ourselves forward into one cycle after the next, but never actually reaching our destination.
Until that day. That damn day.
In my room, Raf held my face in his hands, desperately and maybe even a little angrily, after telling me his secret. “I’m serious,” he whispered, over and over. Or maybe it was “I’m sorry,” but I was too distraught to hear it.
“But what about Stu? It’s not fair.”
“He’d never go along with it, and you know it.”
“But we could tell him. Gently, you know? We’re in this together. I’ll talk to him. I’m better at breaking the bad news.”
“Bad news? Really?”
“Oh, you know what I mean.”
Raf looked at me and gave a slight nod. When he closed my door behind him, he didn’t look back.
After that, Raf never really looked at me again. Or when he did, he didn’t see me—he saw through me. When there was any conversation to be had, he responded, but it was always in the middle of doing something, his mind elsewhere, my questions and statements a vague imposition.
Raf surprises me when he stands to set aside the carton he had been eating from and gestures at it. “We really need to eat our meals from proper plates again. Stu should wash the dishes.”
“Yeah. I really miss Stu.”
“Well, he hasn’t left his room in ages.”
“I can try talking to him.”
Raf feels distant again, and he disappears out of my line of sight. After a beat, I hear, “You do that,” as if an afterthought.
Stu once told me that I should stop writing what I knew. Don’t be boring, he said. Be brave. “So I should write about…what…what I don’t know?” No, no. Write about what terrifies you.
I get off the couch and cross the room to Stu’s door. He hasn’t talked to me or to Raf, and we really don’t see him around the apartment anymore. I suppose he goes out and about when we leave, creating mayhem solo, maybe looking at settees in a catalog. He always did have a flair for the dramatic.
When I knock, it feels different.
“Stu? Stu, are you okay? Can we talk, please?”
No answer.
“Please? Just this one time, and I’m never bothering you again.”
Silence.
I rest my ear on the door, and push the handle down. For once, it clicks open.
“I’m coming in, Stu.”
And I do.
We—all of us—are born twice. The first time, it’s for others, witnessed by them, and if we’re lucky, cradled and launched into the world with a gentle hand. The second time, we’re born for ourselves. Mostly, when that happens, we’re alone. We stumble into a new consciousness, either dulled by pain or sharpened by it, and our eyes open, open, open, free to finally see what’s right in front of us.
Stu’s room is dark, empty, save for a chair facing the window. I don’t even recognize it. The place looked like it had been left undisturbed for a while.
When I look back at where I came from, the apartment was similarly bare. Abandoned and hollowed out. Yes, the dishes were there, and some of the books, a few of them waterlogged. The floor bore marks where the couch had carried our combined weight and the tremendous quiet of our burdens.
I remember that our living room windows look out onto the street.
Out there on the curb is our couch, ripped and ragged, swollen with rain and rot. Illuminated by a streetlamp, I see that it’s older by many, many springs, and many, many other seasons.
Today is the second time I’m born. I’m light and sky and zephyr, walls leaking meaningless words and memory, all sinking into the middle, a star caving into itself. My absence of fear terrifies me.
I think I’ll write about that.