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She felt like an intruder in her own home.
It was strange to look at these walls, look at this furniture, these belongings that seemed to belong to someone else. She ran her finger over frames which held memories that she felt detached from.
She sighed, and looked at the pile of boxes Roy had brought home from the warehouse. She had asked for time alone in the house to pack up her things, and he had complied. It was heartbreaking, actually, how good he was being about everything.
He had fought, briefly, against her when she asked to call the wedding off.
“But I love you!” He kept repeating, and she cringed every time. Love, she wanted to tell him, wasn’t enough to keep her in a relationship that probably should have ended right around the time their high school career had. Love, wasn’t enough to keep her from crying at night when she thought about Stamford and a tall salesman who took a piece of her with him when he had hurried out of town. Love, wasn’t enough to stop her from thinking about all the ways that her life could be different, better, more fulfilling than working at a mid-sized paper company and engaged, indefinitely, to a man who wanted nothing more than to work in a paper warehouse and drink beer with his brother for the rest of his life.
“Roy,” she pleaded. “Please.” She wasn’t sure what she was asking him. Please, make this easier on her? Please stop talking about love and marriage and those times up at the cabin when they made love on the back porch under the stars and he would pick pine needles out of her hair as she breathed out his name? Please, stop saying I love you as if that was going to fix everything, when it couldn’t fix anything?
“Please what Pam?” He yelled, slamming his hand on the table, causing both Pam and the vase of flowers to shudder. “I’m supposed to make this easier on you? On you? On my girlfriend of ten years who up until the minute she told me that she wanted to break-up, I thought was happy? Why am I supposed to make this easier? Why?” His eyes were tinged red, and he was shaking slightly.
“Fiancée,” Pam corrected softly. “I’m not your girlfriend, Roy,” she paused. “I’m not your anything.” She had stormed out of their small house, slamming the door behind her and she realized after she had walked out that she had no where to go. She pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes and took a deep breath and counted to ten.
But Roy had backed off, and he had assured her that he would make himself sparse so that she could go through her things without him staring at her and making her feel guilty, and talking about memories of times past thinking that recalling all those good times would somehow make her suddenly want to unpack all of her things and stay forever.
She didn’t want the pictures, but she wasn’t sure if leaving them for Roy to dispose of was fair either, and so she hovered over the framed pictures, until finally she packed them in a box and left the box on the dining room table with a note for Roy asking him what he wanted to do with them.
Pam packed up boxes and clothes and art supplies and finally, after everything was taped up and shoved into her tiny car, she sat down on the sofa and cried.
She smoothed out her skirt and stood in the doorway of her old house, in a place where she had lived with Roy for years, in a place where she had dreamt about being Mrs. Roy Anderson, and a place where that had been enough for her until Jim swept in and told her he wanted to be more than friends.
She got into her car, her car, the car she had bought by herself, and which didn’t smell like Roy’s truck and Roy’s hands, and didn’t rumble and bounce, and which when she drove it she felt kind of light and free, and drove to her new apartment.
Her apartment was small, one bedroom, one living room, one kitchen, and one bathroom for one person. She hadn’t been just a single person in ten years and it was thrilling and terrifying all at once.
She spent the rest of the night putting away all her things, which suddenly didn’t feel like her things, and she cried a little as she thought about sweet Roy, and kind Jim, and how she broke both their hearts and still ended up alone, in the tiny shoe-box apartment with boxes of things that she didn’t even want. And she wondered, not for the first or last time, whether she had made the right choice.
Story Notes:
The title is from a Jenny Lewis song, and I'm not entirely sure where this came from. But I couldn't not write about it. I'm not sure if I like it or not, but things were flying around my head and I had to do something about it.
