Not Everything We Hold Is Ours to Keep
by Heather Rolland
“This is how we get through our lives: we tell ourselves stories so that what’s happening becomes something we can live with. Necessary fictions.” — Lidia Yuknavitch
I was looking for my grandparents’ wedding photos when I opened the box. In it lay a collection of my husband’s odds and ends, damp and filthy:
a box of condoms;
a tan leather handgun holster splotched with mildew;
a white cotton baseball cap with a logo I didn’t recognize;
an old Chronogram magazine;
a new-looking Artie Traum CD;
a lot of white cotton rope, piled, not wound into a hank, also freckled with black mildew;
a small trophy, the engraved plaque indicating triumph in an English competition;
another CD, this one without a case or label;
a single piece of white copy paper;
an empty toilet roll;
and the gift I gave him on our first anniversary. It was a book I made, chronicling our first year together.
I picked up the slim five-by-eight volume between my thumb and forefinger. The book, having been at some point in its years of exile soaked with mouse urine, was sticky. The moisture-thickened paper stank. A scrapbook of sorts I printed photos at home on an inkjet printer. Some of the ink in the photos I had pored over for hours—selecting, cropping, printing, cutting out, and painstakingly arranging in those little stick-on corners—ran. Thin rivers of black or red on the ivory pages. Handmade paper. A handmade book. Smiles, embraces, summit shots on epic hikes; the book was a greatest hits volume one: our first year of adventures together.
I felt contaminated handling the thing. I thumbed through the pages, some of them stuck together, holding my breath. The front and back covers were made from thin paperboard, neatly wrapped in trail maps. I remember gluing them up, pressing and wiping the surface until smooth. When it came time to create the binding, I needed his help handling the drill.
I reached the back page. I had written an inscription: protestations of love forever, the best is yet to come. It was signed “your loving wife.” I dropped it back into the box, my stomach complaining about me lingering in this airless basement room. Broken glass crunched under my boots as I retreated, stacks of boxes just like this one, each filled with a similar discordant collection of my husband’s past, left behind.
He couldn’t keep track of the gift, despite having valued it, at least initially. He couldn’t hold on to it. How did we get to a place where what was once treasured now lies fouled and abandoned? I press and prod it into a story, connect the dots of disintegration, piece by piece. We moved. We were busy. He was working. We lived life and forgot. It’s just a thing; we have the memories.
But crafting a narrative is not the same as being able to tolerate or forgive. A well-told story may breed compassion but not patience. Insight is necessary, but it is not what preserves a relationship. No matter which thread you pluck from the tapestry of truth and no matter how religiously you follow it, beginning to end, in isolation, the single thread—the story you tell—is a lie of omission. I know every time I say anything, I fail to say much more.
Historically, I have cleaned up his messes. It started with his credit card debt (to the tune of thirty-five thousand dollars) when we first met. He never asked me to pay it off, never intimated that he needed or wanted help with it. To him, it wasn’t a problem. He was sure he had it under control. I disagreed. I sold my house and used the profit to clear his debt, trading him my name on the deed of his home. I set up that dynamic, that I was the capable, matter-of-fact, responsible adult. I could bring order, provide the administrative acumen he clearly lacked. He took on the role of hero, rescuing me from internal chaos. I was often one step away from panic, eyes brimming at imagined abandonments, demanding a connection without boundaries. He swept in, a knight in leather jacket, driving a white pick-up truck, ready and willing to become enmeshed. Merged. We hadn’t read Esther Perel: we didn’t know that the erotic required space to breathe, that separation and mystery made space for deep connection. I embodied the efficient and practical mom; he was the good daddy. No wonder we all but stopped having sex.
We can’t help but create the stories. We tell ourselves half-truths and justifications to rationalize a course of action we have already embarked upon. We’re just clean-up crew, scurrying along behind the horse that escaped the barn and is galloping free, quite possibly into oncoming traffic. Explaining, justifying, telling the story of the gate left unlatched. Maybe the best course of action is to hold still and hush. No closing statements. No grand summations. Maybe if we are quiet enough for long enough the story will slip out of hiding, and we may witness its unfolding without the need to box it up.
Some houses are just not well-built. The yellow house has this unfortunate distinction. Designed without a foundation, it has “piers”—concrete footings that are sunk into the earth. In the wintry climate on Bramley Mountain (and when they are poorly constructed), piers are susceptible to frost heave, and heave they did. The zig-zag stress and pressure (one corner of the house lifting while another sank) broke windows upstairs. The failure to properly insulate the floor joists downstairs resulted in mould, mildew, and rot. And the weight of all those boxes broke down what remained of the floor.
One year for my birthday he decided to make me a stool. He had noticed that I impressed a cheap and uninteresting perch from his old house into use when I roasted coffee. He decided a new, custom-made stool was the perfect gift. He took years to create it. Birthdays and Christmases came and went. He had me sit on boards repeatedly, matching the carved seat to my ass. Reminiscent of the optometrist’s “is it better this way? Or that way?” he asked over and over again until my legs went numb, determining the precise angle and height of the bottom rung.
But he never inquired whether I wanted a stool.
Another year it was the chef’s knife. The pretty blade, the fancy steel: would I like one? He would make the handle custom fitted to my hand. I had a chef’s knife I used and loved. It was fine. No thank you. I don’t need or want a new one. I don’t care that much about the fancy steel or the handmade handle.
He bought the knife blank anyway and no detail was spared in fitting that knife to my hand. Saying no didn’t register and, once more, I was required to communicate my preferences. Much the same happened with what remained of our sex life. I tried to explain it once to my doctor, blushing my way through the extended analogy. My husband insisted that all sex comply with the ice cream sundae structure: at least three scoops, sauce, whipped cream, nuts, and a cherry. If I expressed desire for, say, a soft serve twist, or, god forbid, plain vanilla in a cup, I was rejecting him. No ice cream at all was the only compromise he could tolerate. But then, if I agreed to a sundae with the works, I also had to choose ice cream flavours enthusiastically. What I wanted mattered, and my desires were celebrated—as long as I wanted what he wanted me to want.
Late last spring, I found a dead porcupine in a hollow tree. Maybe the result of old age, a nasty fall, a territorial fight, or injuries from a car accident: it’s a tough life for the slow-moving quill pig. I wanted the skull, so I left it there, keeping an eye on it as it decomposed. I plan to take the skull home and place it on the shelf next to the other ones. I can invent the story of the dead porcupine in the hollow tree. I can let it mean something. And yet I know one day I will be gone and someone else will have to empty the cupboard of feathers, skulls, bones, and quills. The blue ceramic horse that fell and broke its legs so many times, they now resemble a jigsaw puzzle of lines and cracks and dried glue. One hoof missing, it tilts and wobbles, threatening another crash and more broken legs… but I can’t discard it.
It’s fair to characterize my relationship to stuff as idiosyncratic. Years ago, I hauled out all my undergraduate photo work—probably twenty-five pounds worth of expensive photo paper, and years of my life—and set it ablaze in a barrel in the driveway. But I kept my fourth-grade book reports, the crayon and construction paper covers pebbled with age. The work of childhood: even the spelling errors and literary winks at the reader were forgivably adorable. I keep those reports as if they were someone else’s, not mine. I can’t throw them away; she might want them. My job is to keep them safe for her.
Not so the shopping bag half full of letters. Those are all mine, but I am not one person. I am each of the recipients, the Heather that was written to by a parade of lovers, friends, family members. I found love letters scrawled bravely in hands unaccustomed to English language, penmanship more comfortable in Hebrew or Farsi, adorned with terms of endearment that do not have equivalents in English. When Ronnen called me koush koush in front of Abbas, Abbas laughed. I asked him privately what that phrase meant in Farsi. He smiled a knowing smile and said, “delicious meat.” I blushed.
I opened the bag this morning and read the card on top. It was dated 1995. I had been married for two years; my daughter was a year old. It was from a man I wanted to have an affair with but didn’t. We never even kissed. I don’t know if my then-husband believed me, that nothing ever happened, but it’s true. We had a powerful magnetic attraction to each other, but we chose not to act on it. Instead, we talked. We talked for hours, day after day, for several months. We denied our bodies but met behind closed doors to enter each other’s psyches. In today’s lingo, it would be called an emotional affair.
The card acknowledged that bond. The writer of the card, the man I had been so close to, wrote poignantly about what we had had and how awkward things were now that we had moved on with our lives. “We had been so close. Now we’re not. I want to reach out to you and rekindle that closeness, but the moment is over and I can’t. I feel all this, hold it in my heart, and share it with you.” That was the gist of the card. Reading it this morning, almost thirty years later, I sobbed. I can’t even name the emotion that overwhelmed me. It was pure, visceral, and it overtook me like an eighteen-wheeler on a highway in a downpour. I felt ill, almost blinded; I swerved from the sheer power of it.
Each time I lost a part of myself, I told myself I didn’t really need it anyway. I could live without. I had had it and that needed to suffice. Everything ends. But then I look back at these losses, the lives I didn’t live, the opportunities lost, the hard choice I made quickly that took me away from these letter writers, into something that cannot be evaluated. I can’t say it was better, or it was the right choice, or it brought me my daughter, or there were lessons I had to learn, or it was my destiny. All these stories we tell ourselves…
It simply is what I did. Here is where I am. And, when the next loss unfolds and breaks me, as a consolation I will tell myself that not everything we hold is ours to keep.
I broke a glass at the house on Cape Cod where I was staying, ostensibly as a writing retreat. I hadn’t put the glass away promptly after washing it. Left out on the drainboard, it was a sitting duck. I couldn’t find a dustpan and brush, so I began picking up large pieces carefully with my fingers. Not carefully enough, I scarcely touched an edge and began bleeding. Enough to need to cover it, lest I add blood-borne pathogen–level cleaning to the pre-checkout punch list. The vacuum cleaner was ancient, canister style, and weighed a ton. It reminded me of the one we had growing up, the one I would ride when I was a toddler.
I barely made contact with that shard, and I’ve been opened up, bleeding. This is my life these days. I don’t know how deeply I’ve been cut until I try to move on. I keep discovering wounds of known and unknown origin. I keep seeking plasters for the new ones, changing the gauze and tape on those that are supposedly healing. I try going on with my day, returning to the task at hand without making a mess.
Things can be irreparably broken, and it’s no one’s fault. If you backtrack from the unmendable end, you can identify touchpoints along the way where decisions were made. In each instance, the decision was defensible. No single action by either one of us was wrong, bad or ill-intentioned. But decisions were made. There were consequences. And sometimes the things we break turn out to be people, or relationships.
As I step away from my now husband and retell the story of our marriage in a different voice, the saddest part has been realizing that, despite needing to define himself as a hero, when I became really sick, he was impotent—powerless.
I couldn’t swallow. Meals took hours to work through, punctuated with racing to the nearest receptacle to regurgitate the log jam wedged, immobile, in my esophagus. He would leave the table, perhaps conceptualizing his departure as an offering of privacy. Or perhaps he was just bored, antsy, feeling awkward watching me grimace and chug my beer—anything to force food down. Nothing worked.
He never offered to come with me to doctor’s appointments, never offered the concrete support of simply being present. He saw the competent me. The parental me. The administrative me. He could not see the hopeless and terrified me; that was not part of his lexicon. His world was divided sharply along clear-cut lines. I was competent; this illness was nothing I couldn’t handle because, well, I handled everything. I hid behind a facade of bravery and stoicism. As much as I shrugged off help, I desperately wanted it. And as much as I projected competence, I craved connection. I just wanted someone to hold this illness thing with me. I couldn’t find a voice to ask for space to be vulnerable and to need. And he couldn’t adjust his image of me to offer support.
The other evening, I was leaving a nature preserve, heading home in the chill twilight that is 6:30 p.m. in upstate New York in November. I backed out of the parking area and paused, jiggling the shifter back and forth in neutral. Where am I going? I knew the answer was home. But, in that moment, poised between reverse and first gear, I could not place where home might be. I couldn’t conjure up a visual of “home.” Suspended for that breath, I was unattached to the yellow house, the new house, the memories, or the stories. I just hovered. And for a moment, anything, any reply from within, or without me, felt possible.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Heather Rolland is an emerging writer and psychotherapist based in upstate New York. Her flash fiction, short stories, and essays have been published by Agnes and True, Pinky Thinker Press, Red Noise Collective, and Drunk Monkeys (pending). She writes fiction and nonfiction, hikes every day with her dogs, and is an amateur wildlife photographer.