The Brooklyn Rail

The feeling is like a slow abandon. I equate it to sharing a room, and in the room are all of these things, yours and theirs. Together they make the room, and this room is the relationship.

One day you look up and notice that your partner is grabbing an object from the room and moving it to another place. You take note of this to yourself, but don’t say anything. After all, they are their own person and can take the item if needed. You choose to trust.

Then days, weeks, months later they grab more objects, moving them out at odd hours, in clusters, tucking them ever so subtly into their pockets; an entire collection disappearing in your periphery. You try to address it: “Where are you taking those?” But what you really want to ask is not “where,” but “why” are you taking those? Though you don’t assert this distinction out loud. Instead, you self soothe. You trust less, they recede more.

You go on living together, cohabitating with the phantom objects. Some of the missing items are easy to ignore, while others you’re quick to replace, contributing in excess. They don’t mention what they’ve removed either as they continue to grasp, lift, carry, take.

At some point you allow yourself to notice that everything they had initially contributed to the room, your shared room, is gone. In their place, you are left with faint dust outlines, a louder echo, and a sinking feeling in your stomach. Although neither of you allude to it, you know what you knew with the first object's departure.

A dampness sets in, coating everything in a thin layer of weight, of heaviness. It’s distinct from dew held by tension on the surface of things—it seeps in deep—entirely absorbed by the room. Have you ever left a warm mug on a wooden table and been too late to wipe off the condensation? The grain widens slightly, the surface buckles, and a milky, foggy white film appears and remains. This trace now stretches from wall to wall in the room, barely perceptible but impossible to ignore.

As the surfaces continue to swell from the moisture, the frantic feeling of replacing this and that is supplanted by lethargy. You are too tired to keep inventory, too distraught and depleted to continue to furnish the gaps. In your exhaustion, you finally pause. Your partner is nowhere to be found. It’s in this stillness that you feel the pulse of the removed objects continuing to have life elsewhere, without you. Those that remain in the room are soggy. You discover that during your frenzy to maintain continuity, you started to supply the room with hastily constructed cardboard replicas: vases that don’t hold water, table edges that bow outward, chairs that crease, lamps without bulbs and electrical wires, and woven rugs that cause paper cuts on the soles of your feet.

Your partner comes around to the room, now practically a visitor. It’s difficult for them to understand why you are upset, since nothing in the room that’s hurting you is actually theirs anymore. Desperate to keep the connection, you try to explain. They listen in earnest, perplexed. They attempt to reassure you that they haven't removed anything of consequence from the space, that the room is in fact still yours and theirs. That they aren’t absent. Yet they don’t offer to bring back the objects or refurbish any of the damaged items. Their words are of little comfort and seem as if they are convincing themselves that they still reside here, in this place with you. You try to trace the dilapitation’s origin, but between the two of you, you cannot seem to pinpoint the moment when the room began to fall apart.

This is why I call it a slow abandon, because even though you are able to identify the missing items as having something to do with the room’s disrepair, their particular role and greater meaning is unclear, rendered inaccessible by the elongation of time and circumstance. While your partner was removing objects, you spent your time noticing, then overlooking disappearances, eventually getting so caught up in reshuffling the room by yourself that you exhausted your inner resources. Despite their distance, you continued to live here, to hold the sodden objects and force their continued function, leaning into the ambivalence and mistaking your endurance for patience and steadfastness. You kept yourself in the room, holding on, insisting on its viability. And so, the abandon I’ve named is your own withdrawal, not theirs.