Empty, Now Filled.

I moved into the stone house on Lancaster Street in May of 2007. He didn’t think I’d leave but I did. I told him I wasn’t afraid to be alone and flounced out the door the day after finals were over and he was so angry he put what was left of my belongings on the lawn, raving and frothing in anger in a spectacle all the neighbors enjoyed. They liked him even less than I did by then.

Suddenly I had a home that was mine and no one else’s. I’d never been alone before, but the apartment was warm and close like a tiny mouse hole in the wall of the old building- dusty and creaking, but mine all the same. I filled every nook and cranny with things I loved, things I wanted, things I had forgotten that I’d had until suddenly the whole place was just filled with me. The glass globe candles, the William Carlos Williams collection, that hook by the door in the shape of a dog’s tail where my keys hung- it was all me.

I’ll never forget walking in the door the first time after I was all unpacked. I walked right into myself coming in the door, stumbling a little at the shock. There, over there on the recliner I saved from the trash because it was sad looking and needed a new home, draped with the blue and white afghan it took my mother five years to finally finish for my high school graduation present, that was me. And look, there’s the bulletin board I’d had since tenth grade, holey and tacked with pictures from high school, movie tickets from films I’d never watch again, and an Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman holiday ornament I was given in gratitude for helping a woman set up her crafts table at a fair at the YWCA, that was me. My calm and collected Buddha birdfeeder that I brought inside when I bought it because I couldn’t stand to not look at his smiling, pudgy face, even when I saw my boyfriend’s very unhappy face at the idea, sits cross-legged on the coffee table I’d bought at Blue Mountain for five dollars. Shelves and shelves and shelves of books, books thrown in baskets, stacked on windowsills, piled high on the desk and shoveled into neat piles on the floor, books are everywhere, as if the walls are full of them and they are spilling out of cracks that had formed from the literary pressure. Books that I’d packed carefully into boxes that filled an entire car when I moved to South Carolina and that took two movers a half hour to carry inside when I moved back. There’s the shoebox of pictures I keep (though I’ve never been very sentimental about photographs), and the red bike I always say I’ll ride but never do out of love for walking. My little brown-black-white dog with his round body and spindly legs walks over to me to snuffle at my jeans, his dainty steps hesitant like a dancer after an injury. I named him after Bruce Springsteen, but he’s nothing like The Boss- he can’t even play guitar well.

In the kitchen my prized cookie jar, a little smiling monk stating “Thou Shalt Not Steal” sits alongside my stand mixer which I begged and begged for last Christmas. The microwave table sighs and sags from the weight of so many cookbooks that burden its varnished surface. The little flowered purple one that sits on top is full of family secrets going back several generations, hand copied and presented to me by my mother on my 16th birthday. It’s full of the wisdom that southern women pass down to their daughters in the kitchen in the summer as they wipe their brows with the back of their wrist and smooth their hair, and the best damn cornbread recipe you’ll ever see.

My bathroom is littered with pink towels, pink bottles, pink bare feet as I revel in my first opportunity to be as girly as I want without regard to which towel my boyfriend will have to use when he showers. It smells like lilacs and I don’t even care if all the scent goes out the candles I’ve opened in there; for now it smells like a garden.

My bedroom, oh how I love it. I spent a small fortune on soft white sheets and a blue comforter to curl into every night with Hannah Arendt or John Steinbeck, or Salman Rushdie- whoever I am passionately in love with at the moment. My squat pink IKEA alarm clock glows in the dark, but doesn’t illuminate the time, letting me believe time is what I make of it.

This rush of meeting myself for what felt like the very first time was powerful, monumental. I could do whatever I wanted, lock the outside world out when it belonged there, and welcome it in when I was lonely.  I was terrified and thrilled at same time, trembling with freedom and the terror of choice. I spent hours planning the meals I’d cook, the small parties I’d throw, the ways I’d spend my night in sweatpants on my slip-cover covered loveseat reading or watching documentary after documentary on the History Channel until I fell asleep where I sat.

I live alone again now; my summer roommate moved out last night. When he left I felt myself expand, filling up the rooms he’d left clean and tidy, a feeling like a stretch after a long nap where your joints pull and you can’t hear right for a time. I re-arranged furniture, spread out over my territory, my mind shouting “Manifest Destiny!” as I puffed pillows, and placed bookends in places I’d not owned just a day before. I’m making tea now, darjeeling, and drinking it in my favorite daisy-covered mug while I sit in the middle of myself, just admiring.