Bookends on Rebounding

Beginnings and Endings within the chapters of a life can provide catharsis

The brackets on the other side were better despite the gnawing feeling that something would go disastrously wrong.

After four months as a naked mole rat terrified to leave the confines of the Vegas apartment for anything more than food, smokes, or booze, I woke up with all my furniture and dishes and lamps packed, sitting in the middle of the room. I was bumped out of my hungover sleep by the sound of the fire alarm.

Nothing was on fire. Rather, the water heater had burst and the entire place was covered in two-inches of standing water with a gushing torrent continuing to soak the walls. I started to panic then realized all my things were stowed in plastic tubs.

Two days and lots of drying out the place later, I put everything I own minus clothes, computer, and a leaning desk for Kansas into a moving pod, locked it up, and the moving company took it to the heartland. At one point, as I was carrying tubs and furniture, my ex-wife popped her head out of the apartment she’d been plying her trade from and asked if I needed any help.

“Nope. I’m good,” I said without making eye contact. I was determined to do it all on my own and I did. Rather than moving, it felt like an escape. That night I slept on the bed that her mother bought us as a wedding gift. The next day I took that bed and left it propped up by the garbage dumpster, did the last bit of cleaning, packed my Prius up to the top, and headed out of Las Vegas later that night. I had made a sad breakup songs playlist on my phone and listened to it on the highway through Utah in pitch blackness. It was so dark it felt like I was flying through outer space.

Just shy of six months later, that same moving pod was delivered in front of my parent's home. My first reaction was that the pod was so damn small. It was more like a portable walk-in closet than it was the receptacle of everything I owned in the world. I cracked it open and was again struck with how little I had. I planned the move. The new apartment is in a downtown building with a parking garage. There is no place to put the pod. The plan became unload what I could into my dad's truck, drive to the place, get that load up to the seventh floor apartment, rinse and repeat.

My mom and sister dutifully offered to help me with the bigger stuff on Saturday but on Friday, my first move-in day, I woke up with the idea that I would get it all done by myself, that I was spending the night in my new bachelor pad that night.

Like moving out of Vegas, I moved out of my mother and father’s home and into my new life solo. It was a pain in the ass (I broke the elevator ceiling with my couch) but, despite my fifty-seven year old back complaining to HR, it was exactly the bookend I needed.

Unpacking my stuff revealed that I was really not in my right mind as I packed to leave the desert. I had a big box of screws but hadn’t bothered to pack a screwdriver. I had four butter knives but it seems I left all of our steak and carving knives to her. I kept thinking I must have missed a few tubs when transferring from pod to pad.

What I did pack was a reminder of who I was before all the horseshit blew up in my face. The couch/daybed/Gaybed I bought when I moved into the apartment on Beacon Street in Chicago. The devil mask given to me by Chuck Palahniuk after I interviewed him for the WBEZ Arts podcast. The Carl Kassel doll. A copy of the Metaluna and the Amazing Science of the Mind Revue script. All of which were tokens of who I used to be and what I had experienced prior to the disaster that was my third marriage.

The nagging feeling that something would wrong was, well, wrong. On this side of moving that pod, things went exactly right. While money will be a bit tight for a month or so, I had enough to get in. My back aches but I’m already (mostly) unpacked. I still have the time and proximity to both help my dad with his dialysis and come home for a delicious meal. Mom and I still get movie days and the symphony.

I recognize that at some point I’ll be capable of seeing some of the good in five of those seven and a half years but right now I need to remember who I was before I was the cuckold to her kink. These things. This place. The people here. My job where I am seen as someone of genuine skill.

Moving my shit by myself. Sitting in the loft apartment in a museum of a person I was and can be again. The bookends of rebound.