What We Leave Behind

The apartment already felt like someone else's. Maya stood in the center of the living room, her gaze catching on the orange vinyl armchair they'd bought together at that estate sale in Portland—the one Julian had insisted was mid-century modern but she'd thought looked like something from a dentist's waiting room in 1974. Now it was just hers.

Barnaby, Julian's cat, wound himself around her ankles, mewling with that particular insistence that meant his food bowl was empty or he simply required attention. He'd been Julian's companion through grad school, through two moves, through the slow-motion collapse of their marriage. Now Maya would be the one scooping his litter, the one he'd cry for at 3 AM when some phantom prey required pursuit. She'd never wanted a cat. She'd certainly never wanted this one, with his judgmental yellow eyes and his tendency to knock water glasses off nightstands.

On the hook by the door hung Julian's hat—the crushed velvet fedora he'd affected during his brief poetry phase, the one he'd worn to their wedding and to his mother's funeral and to that terrible dinner with her boss where he'd gotten drunk on expensive wine and critiqued the restaurant's acoustics. She should have thrown it away months ago. Instead, she found herself lifting it from its hook, pressing the crushed crown to her nose. It smelled faintly of his shampoo and the clove cigarettes he'd smoked on their balcony, pretending she couldn't smell the smoke on his clothes later.

"That's everything," the mover said from the doorway, and Maya startled, realizing she'd been standing there for minutes, holding the hat like some kind of artifact. "You sure you don't want us to take the chair?"

She looked at the orange armchair again, at the cat still circling her ankles, at the hat in her hands. These were the things that remained when love eroded—objects and animals and obligations, the detritus of a life built together now being sorted into keep and discard and who gets what. Julian had taken the books and the good pots and the memory foam mattress. She'd gotten the cat and the chair and the hat she'd secretly hated for years.

"No," she said. "I'm keeping it."

The mover nodded, didn't ask why she'd want to keep a chair that hurt her back and reminded her of failure. Some things you kept not because you loved them, but because letting them go would mean admitting something you weren't ready to admit yet. Some things you kept because they were proof you'd tried, however badly, however briefly.

Barnaby rubbed his head against her calf, purring now. Maya set the hat back on its hook, where it would hang until she was ready to either wear it or throw it away. Someday. Not today.