Chapter 2: The elevator
All pain is invisible if you don't shout it out loud from your lungs.
Read Chapter 1 first.
Chapter 2
A month had passed since I had left behind my own home. During our informal negotiations about how to divide our furniture, electronics and household linens, we had agreed I would only take a few personal items. I was looking forward to leaving behind not just a terminally ill marriage, but also all the contents that filled our life during the past eight years. The weekend when I moved out, my former husband conveniently went on a trip to avoid witnessing the dismantling of both our living-room and our life together.
I had three days, at the end of March that year, to pack my personal belongings and move them into the room I had rented in a shared flat across town.
The first of the three days I sat on our couch and cried. I wasn’t physically capable of moving a finger to start collecting my things. It was as if my brain refused the reality of what I had to do. Also, I wasn’t physically capable of making myself stop crying. The tears poured from my eyes even in my sleep.
We had decided to separate a couple of months before, after many more months of trying to make our marriage work. We both knew it was better to part our ways, so I was fully aligned with the decision as well. Until the day when I had to actually carry out the real separation. To rip apart the actual objects and move them into a different space. Only then did I perceive the new reality in the knot inside my stomach, in the cervical muscles on my upper back. Until then, it had been an intellectual decision, which existed only in my rational mind. But as I started unscrewing nails from cupboards and sorting through bed sheets to decide which to take with me and which to leave to him, that was when it hit me.
The second day started the same way. By lunchtime I thought I was going to run out of time if I didn't start packing soon. I pushed myself to start just like a grieving mother sorts through her dead child’s clothes and toys to give away to charity. One shelf at a time, one room at a time. I entered action and planning mode. I managed to bury my feelings deep in my stomach for a few hours, by putting my mind to work. The mind needs a practical task to solve in order to fulfill its intended purpose and keep it from rummaging. Just concentrating on getting the job done. When I stopped during breaks, awareness crept in and tears crept out. I packed until late into the night, managing to sort through most of the previous eight years of my life.
On that Sunday, the last day I had to finish moving out, a friend came by to help me carry my stuff to the new flat. For the entire duration of my stay in that new place I refused to call it ‘home’. I called it ‘the flat’, ‘the new house’, ‘my flat mates' home’, but never my home. Because my home was the one I was leaving behind. Before my friend arrived, I started taking some of the boxes downstairs. Even though I was in action mode, I was still surprised by sudden bursts of tears at the most unexpected, and inconvenient, of times. When that happened, I had to take a moment, steady myself and push myself to continue doing the job.
After one such inconvenient episode, I wiped my eyes dry, for probably the hundredth time, I shoved a few boxes into the elevator with my foot, I squeezed in next to them and pressed the button for the ground floor. The elevator started moving slower than usual, or so my dizzy head perceived. Just a split second after the slow start, the lights blinked like in those scary movies I never watched. The elevator stopped, pitch dark inside it. Time stood still. My heart started racing. Fear was a more stimulating feeling than sadness. The fact that I could die any second if the elevator suddenly crashed sobered me fast. I let out a faint cry for help, knowing nobody could hear me anyway. Despite the mental fog all that grief was giving me, in that moment I was clear-headed:
I want to live! God, don’t let me die in an elevator.
Suddenly, being alive was appealing again, after a weekend when only dying seemed to be the solution to end the pain.
I will live through all of this. I will live through a stuck elevator. And I will live after a defunct marriage!
The words were pounding their fists into my brain. A rush of adrenaline shot through my veins, I breathed superficially in my upper chest. Then, as if time took its course again, the technical hiccup passed. The elevator blinked back into light and started gliding silently downwards.
A marriage embodies the entire Universe on a small scale. It is created between two pairs of hands and four walls of a home. Whether it only lasts a few months or a few decades, the Universe of the marriage is embroidered with dreams, embellished with plans for the future, painted to last an eternity, and sealed with the marriage certificate.
But when the common path comes to an end, the micro-Universe gets packed up like a dead pet. Wrapped in an old newspaper and thrown into the trashcan out in the back. It doesn't even matter why the path got divided into two lanes, or that the decision was a sensible one according to reason. The embroidery rotted, the dreams burst into thin air like a bubble of soap caught between the palms of a child. All that matters is that the micro-Universe no longer exists.
And that was a paradox for my brain. Passionate about logic, it lagged behind, dumbfounded. From the outside, things didn’t seem much different. I was still there, continuing my daily activities. But every day I walked on new sidewalks in new neighborhoods trying to comprehend who I was now. And especially why I was still around, if my micro-Universe imploded. I suddenly questioned my very existence. Like a snail that suddenly finds itself without its shell. It can continue to live, gliding naked on a leaf, but without the home case on its back, is it still a snail?
My two new roommates, busy with the embroidery of their own dreams, politely looked through me rather than at me when I spoke with them. They confused my standing on my two feet, gaze forward, with my well-being. If I didn’t need a hospital bed, one for the physically ill or one for the mentally ill, then I must be fine.
All pain is invisible if you don't shout it out loud from your lungs.
In the wake of the new reality, all I could do every day was to aim for small victories. To be able to put on some make-up while crying, without smudging it—a handy skill I acquired during that time. To be able to walk standing up straight while sobs involuntarily came out of my throat, a sure sign that my soul, broken into thousands of pieces, was leaving my body. To be able to stick to a vague sports routine, a personal declaration of health signed on an optimistic day. Small victories that were worth an Olympic medal in those weeks after my micro-Universe disappeared.
Read next: Chapter 3 - White
I liked this Chapter 2 so much also Monica! Your way of putting things into words transposed me to that past; for a few minutes I was your invisible witness in those rooms and the elevator. And there are quite some sentences I liked on their own: “The words were pounding their fists into my brain” !
I like the metaphor of the marriage as a micro-universe and how you describe the elevator experience. I could imagine it very well, just like in a movie. I could not stop reading although it was way too late..