When my wife left me, she went back to stay with her mother. I’m told such arrangements aren’t unusual. What was kind of unusual was that “going back to her mother” required her to move over 1,100 miles away. What was more unusual was that move meant that she left a giant stack of boxes and loose stuff in my living room for around six months while she arranged for movers – movers who were so inept they didn’t get to the task at hand for a month because they couldn’t answer a phone – she could afford to move it the same 1,100 plus miles to her mom’s house.
Over that six months, I made sure to find as much “missing’ stuff as I could to send up there and made sure, via her mother since she’d decided she needed to “not talk” for a while (“a while” lasted pretty much until this very day except some “emergency’ communication about her stuff getting moved). Of course that attention to detail was not appreciated and a month after the stuff left she began to complain I didn’t send things she’d said via her mother or via letters in the mail she didn’t want me to send. To make it worse, she sent a list of things that “weren’t sent” that we’d never found or worse, the “friends’ she had help her pack some of it up very likely “liberated” from her the day they helped.
After months of looking for any sign, and slowly finding some of the extra stuff she wanted sent, I told her mom what I’d found, we discussed what to send and then I boxed it up and had UPS send it along. At that point, with the exception of anything really important or of great sentimental value that turns up, I considered the “shipping her the stuff” issue closed and the court agreed about two months later.
However that means there is a lot of “wreckage in the ruins.” There is a lot of her stuff that is just sort of left behind. She didn’t want it, but it was hers. It’s stuff she thought she could do without or thought was too expensive to ship or thought would upset her because I gave it to her. Some of it is just refuse she left behind with no value at all.
It’s the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked marriage, floating along behind me. I can’t bring myself to dispose of it all at once even though I know it would be fine to do so, maybe even cathartic. Instead it sits here in the house awaiting its fate. Will I keep it or throw it away? Will it end up in the trash? The recycling bin? A yard sale, maybe? Perhaps some little local shop?
Downstage Aside 