I’d had the keys for a month. I’d brought things over in stages. But this was the first time I arrived with the last carload and the knowledge that there was no other address, no mother’s house on the other end of the day. Just this.
I parked in the small driveway the landlady and I shared. I sat in the car for a minute.
Then I brought in the last boxes.
Maya came that evening with takeout, and we sat on the floor because I didn’t have a couch yet — the one I’d ordered was arriving the following week — and we ate from containers and I felt the specific strangeness of being in a quiet place where nobody needed me.
“How does it feel?” Maya asked.
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
She nodded. She was good at not pushing.
The feeling was complicated in the way that most feelings about big transitions are, which is to say it was several things at once and I couldn’t sort them into a clean answer. There was relief, which I’d expected. There was grief, which I’d also expected. There was a strange kind of free-fall sensation that I hadn’t anticipated, the sense that the structure I’d been moving within for twelve years was gone and I now had to remember what I’d wanted before the structure existed.
The answer to that question was not clear. I was forty-two, which is not old, but it’s also not a beginning. I had a job I was good at and a two-bedroom apartment and a folder of documents that had helped me establish, in the middle of a grief-heavy autumn, that twelve years of my life had been real and that I had not been taking a free ride.