It is hard to imagine that inanimate objects can harbor feelings, but, they can and do. Made of plastic or metal or wood or fabric, it doesn’t matter; memories and thoughts are just other characteristics that validate them for what they are.
Charcoal. Bells. Green ink.
These things, they wear such personality on their many textured bodies.
Like the scuff marks on the tiny, golden, bells you hung up for Christmas incorrectly. Together we watched them fall in a cacophony of cluttered, fragile, noise. I had smiled at the mess, then, while you swore and cursed until you couldn’t think of any other profanity to utter. While you muttered and pulled at your hair with bent fingers, I knelt down to pick up the string of bells and listened to the ornaments sing out in ecstasy as their golden bodies bumped and stroked each other. And without commentary, I hung them back up--correctly this time—and returned to you and the rest of the ornaments.
Like the small craters that adorn the charcoal pencils where your teeth have sunk into the wood. You watched me gaze intently at the television on that New Years Eve we shared. Smoke slithered up from the burning end of your cigarette. It drooped limply from your lips as your hand made impatient and sharp strokes across the paper while you sketched. And when you were done, you quietly told me-- around the pencil you chewed on-- that you loved me. I looked at you and smiled and said nothing. I hear you still have that drawing despite everything.
Like the smooth green ink that used to stained my journal pages. The very same that I write on now. How your writing scrolled messily across the pages, filling the empty space with words and thoughts and pictures. They were things of nothing, and yet at that time, they were something. To me. To you. But not to strangers or your friends or my parents. They spoke of the bitterness of that morning’s coffee, or the static that the television had produced for a couple days, or the patterns your fingers had drawn in the foggy window above our bed. And how after a hard day’s work I would come home and curl underneath the comforter and read what you wrote for me. I wish I still had those pages, but, perhaps it is for the best that I don’t.
The objects I still have are accompanied by memories. They bring with them not just sweet sounds, ink, charcoal, but feelings of unadulterated sweetness and laughter; a certain tightness in my chest.
Like the perfume that always made you display such great affections: quick kisses and touches and looks; or a pair toe socks that you couldn’t help but play with when I wore them around the apartment.
I find that some objects, however, are burdened by bitterness and pain and misery. I find it hard to touch them as if they were poisonous snakes or burning embers. I know that they themselves cannot hurt me, but, the memories they bring with them do.
Like the mud stain on a pair of penguin pajamas pants I was wearing when I ran from you. We fought that night; you had come home angry and irritated, reeking of alcohol. I had been aggravated for a couple weeks then, when something had set you off; something little. I think I had forgotten to pick up milk at the store. You had yelled at me and I had screamed back. Harsh words fell from your tongue; they were heavy with anger and hatred and dropped to the floor like stones. You accused me of being unable to love; that I was cowardly and perverse. That I let my pride commandeer what I felt and did and said.
Words, narrow and sharp like arrows, launched themselves from my lips. I said that you were clingy like a child, vague, and unpredictable. That you said what should only be thought. From the way you pulled at your hair and cursed I saw that my words hurt you as I had meant them to. Still, there was no satisfaction in hurting you as I had hoped.
I ran from the room, from you, and through the rain to stay at mother’s house for the night. I didn’t sleep. Instead I cried and swore into my pillow and sobbed that I hated you as if you where there.
Like the tattered Candyland board game that now sits in the cupboard untouched and gathering dust. You had placed it in the middle of the dining table and sat down across from me stiffly. You were trying to make peace with me, undo what you had said that night. You were sorry, I could tell. You didn’t have to say it, but I could see by how you fiddled with the plastic game pieces and cleared your throat. But I didn’t care; I didn’t want to make peace with you. The very sight of you made me angry. The little things you did made my throat thicken with insults and curses. How you bent the pages in our books instead of using bookmarks; our short-lived conversations because of your indistinct answers; your overreaction to the bells falling like they did every Christmas for the past three years.
Like the torn dictionary I hurled at you that summer when I asked how your day went and you responded with: ‘Fine’. You hadn’t even stopped to answer me when you entered the apartment. You just kept walking past me and suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had grabbed the thick book from the coffee table and hurled it at your turned back. It hit you with a satisfying thud that echoed once more when it tumbled to the ground in a flurry of white, flapping, pages like a wounded bird. I had yelled at you to find another damned word to use and you paused. And kept walking. So I left.
And you called. Over and over and over. But I wouldn’t pick up and instead listened to your voicemails transform from angry to resentful to panicked. You begged for me to pick up, to answer you, to talk to you. You said you were sorry. And I believed you; I still do. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear it.
It was a week before I spoke to you again. I came back to the apartment and found it in disarray. You were sitting in the middle of the couch, hands linked and resting between your legs. You looked up at me, face haggard and mouth twisted, when I opened the door. You said that you were sorry. I nodded and said I was sorry too; I was and still am. And then you said you loved me, something you weren’t sorry about, and I nodded again and whispered that I knew.
You were always trying to appease me with words and things and touches. At first, I didn’t mind. I thought it was sweet. But after a while, when I started to pull away from you, you tried harder. And I pulled away more.
You thought at one time that I would be appeased with things and objects; that it would close the rift that I had purposefully placed between us. Yet when you saw that those objects held no meaning to me, you didn’t give up as I had hoped you would. Instead, you wished to get a dog with me, said it was no big deal. But it was. It would be something alive that we shared and took care of. Not some book or lamp or plate set. Something living and breathing that we both had to take responsibility of. We fought and you pulled at your hair and I yelled and fumed until you gave up. I thought you had, at least. And then one day when I was home sick you brought home a goldfish we named Gillian. He was the color of newly manufactured pennies.
Despite my objections to getting something alive with you, I liked Gillian. When I was alone in the apartment, I would watch Gillian swim in lazy, tedious, circles, almost as if he were orbiting prey like some miniature, copper, shark. I bought him a bigger tank so he would have more room to swim, but Gillian continued to swim in those tired, numbing circles of his.
Round and round like a carousel horse.