trash
trash (noun)
\ ˈtrash \
something worth little or nothing
a worthless person
something in a crumbled or broken condition or mass
/
The women on Facebook called me trash. Trash, they said - trash, trash, trash, over and over again. It was a trash article, they said, written by a trash person. Trash article, trash “confession,” trash behavior. Her book is probably as badly written as this trash article. Not this trash … ok.
Trash, trash, trash. Trash. Trash. Trash. Trash. The word clanged between my ears, tinny and sibilant. It wasn't garbage. It wasn't rubbish. It was trash, over and over again, over and over and over again, and it was aimed at me.
I knew full well, as I was writing the damned thing, that I’d inevitably get lacerated by a handful of wives who did Wife Things better than I’d done - wives who weren't trash wantons, wives who weren't trash cheaters, wives who weren’t plagued by images of their own trash wrong-doing - but I didn’t foresee quite this much venom.
It stung. The word seared itself into my forehead. My eyes pricked, blood pulsing beneath the lids. I ground a fist into my face. At four o’clock in the morning, after reading through all thirty-eight comments, all the condemning cries of trash! trash! trash! - I wasn't exactly equipped with a salve to make that kind of pain subside. So - well, a fist to the face would have to suffice.
I went back to sleep. I dreamed about a thrift store, and an illustrated copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, and turning the pages only to find it full of poems and pictures. It was slim, and large, with a glossy dust jacket. The store was built into the rock, on the side of Highway 62, and it was dingy - lit only by a skylight or two, the sun streaming in at an angle, flecks of dust floating in the sunbeam that gave me the ability to see my way through the strange, beautiful pages of a book that didn't make any sense.
I woke back up before my alarm went off. It was five minutes before seven. I cleaned the stove, and I fed the animals, and I took the trash out.
/
In the corner of my living room, there’s a wooden structure - a case, of sorts, on stout wooden legs - that was originally used as a chicken hatchery. It’s been several years - decades, probably - since the hatchery was used for its intended purpose. I don’t know how long K’s family had had the thing, but as I came to know it, it was a table in the corner of their upstairs living room in Oceanside, a place for drinks and spare remote controls to be set down upon when playing video games or watching TV. It’s strange to think that, once upon a time, it was used to house rows of eggs, eggs that would eventually quiver and crack and give way to wet, shivering chicks.
K had hated the hatchery. His dad had passed it down to us at my behest, but I distinctly recall him once saying he’d like to burn it, because it was a useless piece of furniture - it was too heavy, he said, and absolutely impractical. I, on the other hand, had loved it, and so when it came to divorce - and all the divvying of possessions that came with it - there was no dispute over me taking custody of the rickety antique incubator.
Aside from supporting a mirror - a mirror too heavy to hang up without taking out a chunk of plaster from the wall - and a lamp, the hatchery currently only serves one purpose. The hatchery is home to my memory boxes.
/
I came back to America for the second time - the permanent time - on May 5th, 2014.
In hindsight, I’m well aware that my re-arrival in America sounds uncommonly romantic, much like a relic from the family fables that belong to my American friends - friends whose great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and great-great-great-grandparents emigrated from Europe, clutching suitcases full of hand-knitted sweaters and sepia-toned photographs and stamped papers. Now, of course, the immigration process is probably more expensive and bureaucratic than it was back then, but all the same: I came back to America with a K1 visa - the “fiancé visa” - with nothing more than a backpack and a laptop case.
There were no boxes sent ahead of time, no parcels shipped across with extra belongings - it was just me, me and my two bags. Among the items I saw fit to bring along to start my new life - among the clothes, the under-hundred-milliliter toiletries, and the odd book or two - I made sure to bring my memories. I’d been privately zealous about keeping hold of these “memories” - the souvenirs of our relationship, for want of a better explanation - because, grouped together like that, they stitched together a story, our story, the story I’d been doggedly attempting to live according to the narrative I assigned to it. The memories were every tangible scrap of romance that I could cobble together from my time spent with - and without - K. Along with my passport and my immigration documents, the memories would have been the first thing I’d have rescued in a fire.
Gradually, I curated the memories together into a box, along with what I could pilfer from K’s own scattered archives. Fortunately, between various desk cubbies and ornamental boxes, he’d kept a lot - the letters from OCS, the letters from life milestones, the letters from birthdays and holidays, the letters sent just because. Perhaps most importantly of all, there was the “book” - the brown photo album, filled from the first page to last with photos and notes and doodles and postcards that I’d scraped together before I left America for the first time. Accompanying these items was a story, a carefully written chronicle, penned in minute handwriting on lined flashcards. It was the story of our year in Pittsburgh together, and I’d given it to K as a parting gift.
Once installed in California, I placed all these items in a box - a white box, the type you’d buy from Michael’s for five bucks, the type used to store shoes or photographs. The only external distinguishing feature of this box was the label, mashed into its metal rim at an angle - The Box of Amy and Killian, it said. It was written in that same, tiny, immaculate handwriting. My own handwriting.
Over the years, one memory box became two, which became three, and then four. I kept everything - every card, every note, every letter. I kept letters from our parents, letters from our grandparents, anniversary cards, birthday cards, Christmas cards. I kept meaningful wine corks, I kept wristbands and ticket stubs, I kept menus and coasters. I kept every one of the hastily scrawled notes we’d written to one another, left on various fridge doors and kitchen counters and car dashboards.
I figured we’d appreciate it, one day. I figured that one day, we’d have all this tangible material to go back to and smile at - a series of time capsules of ourselves, of our relationship, of our families, of the family we were creating together. I figured that if I could only keep those memories out of harm’s way - out of hypothetical house fires, out of K’s decidedly less sentimental hands, away from a brush into the trash can - then the story would be documented for ourselves, for our children, for our children’s children.
/
I have a few theories as to where the fork in the road began to materialize. On my end, there are a few ugly vignettes that lurk around in my head - images of things that happened far before the red room and the final nail in the coffin - but, if I’m being really honest, it was a slow process. It was the other side of the “over the years.”
The years clicked by - one, and two, and three, and the first half of the fourth. The days were spent separately. The weekends were spent separately. The evenings were spent separately. The dates began to bleed together, and life ticked on. There were less trinkets, until there were no trinkets - no meaningful wine corks from private celebrations, no wristbands or ticket stubs from nights spent amongst throbbing crowds, no menus from dinners spent laughing together. Life wasn't punctuated with cork pops, concerts became an impossible endeavor, and dinners were largely spent staring glibly at screens. Januarys became Februarys, Februarys became Marches, and Marches became other months, and all of the weeks and months would go by and - well, suddenly the most time we’d have spent together would have been in the car, or in front of the television.
The additions to the memory boxes began to wane. Where once I had keenly taken every opportunity to salvage, to cling, to curate and call every oddment a memento - as the material began to dwindle, so too did my formerly meticulous habit. I stopped writing the narrative, because I was tired of it. In our separate ways, we both were.
Neither of us meant for it to happen. But, slowly - as the sun rose and set, rose and set, the weeks bleeding into months, months into years - there became less to want to remember. And then even the embers started to flicker out. And then - well, it was just an expanse of very null, very nondescript days.
/
After reading my article - in which I confess, very blatantly, to committing adultery - one of my best friends asked me why I put myself on a pedestal in that way. Why didn't you talk about any of the things Killian did wrong?
My rule, I said, was that I would do nothing to smear his name. My name was mine to tarnish, I said, but his was not. I could affix my name to whatever smut I could muster, I could hurl it at critics, I could chew it up and spit it back out wherever I wished - but I would not touch his.
I will always hold true to that. The only thing I will say, on record, is that - amongst other things - I found a notecard in my boxes that had been attached to some flowers. The note was signed, “An Idiot.”
The rest is neither here nor there. Ultimately, the way that K and I loved one another was different. At my best, I was all sentiment and fervency, and at my worst, I was hot air and screaming fits. K was all manner of good things, but his demeanor was cool and his means of cooling off, after a long day at work, involved solitude by way of screens. As silly as it sounds, these tiny differences metastasized into a rift that neither of us were particularly interested in bridging.
The women who called me trash had been sold something less than a half-truth - an abridged version of one fraction of a multi-faceted story, and my rage stemmed mostly from the fact I couldn’t tell them anything more.
I couldn't tell these women - the women who cried trash! trash! trash! - how painful it had been to give up my whole life for the promise of a happily-ever-after, and to be faced with something that could never have ended happily. I couldn't tell them about the memory boxes, and about how a very solid seventy-something-percent of the effort had always been mine. I couldn't tell them how devastating it is to have your heart broken by a years-long series of dull hacks, as opposed to one gross, grand, swift, clean chop.
I couldn't tell them how exhausting it was to keep plugging away at a story that was never going to end the way I wanted it to. I couldn’t tell them that I did what I did because at last, at long last, I felt like someone - someone else - was finally as passionate about me as I’d always wanted someone to be.
I also couldn’t tell the Facebook women that I’d been wrong about that, too.
I couldn’t tell the Facebook women that having your heart broken twice at the same time makes it pretty difficult to sew the damn thing back together again, and even if I had - I doubt they’d have cared.
/
The day I read the comments was May 20th. The next day would have been my sixth wedding anniversary. Our sixth wedding anniversary.
I made a conscious decision, on May 21st, to do good things for myself. I cut five inches off my hair. I ate as much ice-cream as I wanted to. I bought a DVD player. And, as I lay on the couch that morning with my coffee, I resolved to do the one thing I hadn’t done.
I resolved to cut the last ties. I resolved to take some things to the trash.
I couldn’t re-write my own history, but I could certainly destroy some evidence. It was time, I reckoned, to finally rid myself of them - the both of them, the marriage and the affair, and every piddling snippet of paper that tied me to either of them.
I didn’t do it that day. Instead, I watched Anthony Hopkins’ eyes wrinkle as he served Jessica Lange a pie full of the flesh of her sons in “Titus.” I didn’t do it the next day, or the next day. And there was nothing special about May 24th, except that I had run out of domestic tasks to do and DVDs to watch and errands to run and walks to go on.
So, on May 24th, I went back to the boxes.
/
The last time I’d gone through the boxes - really combed through them, that is - was back in January of 2019. I had picked apart the household, boxing it up on my own - asking K what he wanted, every time I had the smallest of hesitations. And K was in Kuwait, so he was mostly able to answer the phone for my inventory questions. And he did answer, when he could.
I moved around the house in segments - the kitchen, cupboard by cupboard, the living room, shelf by shelf. The downstairs bathroom, the upstairs bathroom, our bathroom. Which shower curtain did he want? Which pictures? Which little porcelain things? Which books? Did he care which bath mat? Did he want the outside chairs? Any inside chairs? What about this in the garage - and that, and that, and that?
I made sure he had everything that was rightfully his. I boxed it up in a way that would make sense to him - labelling things by room, by type, by fragility. I made sure he had enough cutlery, enough pans, enough plates, and I made sure he had all of the things that he’d forgotten about, the things that ought to have meant something to him - the birthday gifts from his best friends, the artwork he coveted, the books he cherished.
There was one night, after spanning the halfway-boxed living room round to the point of the hatchery, that I went through my memory boxes. I hadn’t considered this until I opened one, and found a letter from his grandmother, and suddenly realized that dividing our memories was my responsibility. I trawled through every box, sobbing as I went, whiskey in a red Solo cup, and I gave him back every card and letter from his parents, his grandparents, his friends. I gave him a few things from me.
But I didn’t give him the things that mattered.
/
The things that mattered - the “book,” the cards, the notes - ended up with me. They stayed in their white boxes, squirreled away in the hatchery. I have lived in this apartment for almost a year, now, and I haven’t touched the contents of the hatchery. I know it’s there, but I live with it.
The wedding day, May 21st, was the day I decided to be rid of it. And, for no particular reason, May 24th was the cut-off point.
I wanted it to be ceremonious, but it could never have been. Ideally, I’d have liked to feed every one of those notes into a fire - but I had no fire pit, and I wasn’t about to play the pyromaniac.
I considered a watery death. I imagined myself, standing on the bridge over the canal between 7th and Central, tossing paper onto the water, watching it curl into the breeze and it wend its way downstream until it was out of eyesight. Maybe I'd catch a photo or two on future walks, washed up on one of the ramps where the ducks nested, or scrambled in with the assemblies of empty Polar Pop cups and malt liquor bottles that bobbed in foaming masses against the dams.
But - realistically - neither fire or water was going to be my answer. I didn’t want any more firemen called, and I didn’t want to add to the already littered canal, so I scooped my heap - my heap of doctored greetings cards, messages of love - and I poured them into a plastic bag, and I dropped that bag into the trash can.
I smashed the bag down. Down, down, down - down it went, down into the off-brand, scented trash bag I lined my beautiful, stainless-steel trash can with.
And, just like that, two pounds of storytelling went straight into the bin. Eight years of collected memories - ground down into a bed of empty Diet Coke cans and yogurt pots, plastic bags and cigarette boxes.
Later that day, the memories were joined by dust and dog hair, a fractured nub of face soap, an exhausted bottle of body lotion. All these things went down there together - things I lived with, things I used, things subsequently discarded once they became useless.
/
I'd like to say there was some catharsis in knowing that the hatchery was no longer a mausoleum for a dead marriage.
The truth is - I feel no different.
Because the thing is - you can't throw memories away. Memories are an archive you just have to learn to live with. Memories are an archive full of poltergeists that spit images at you when you don't expect it - and, worst of all, when you can't handle it.
Memories can't be trashed. Memories can't be sent to the bins. Memories don't go away when the dumpster truck comes on a Tuesday morning. Memories don’t flail like a rag-doll in the grip of a metal pincer, and cart themselves off to somewhere you don’t care to know about. Memories don't open their lids and vomit their contents onto the entrails of everyone else’s throwaways.
Memories do, however, make for excellent stories.
And if I have learnt one thing in the almost-three decades I have been alive, it’s that transforming the ugly things, the sad things, and the outright crap into stories - good stories - that’s the best coping mechanism there is.
/
They say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
But I’d be more willing to wager that that man - or woman, for that matter - would be all the wiser for having taken his trash, sat amongst it for a while, and turned it into treasure.
That’s what storytelling is. And that is what I believe - ardently, passionately, potently - that I am here to do.
What’s to come is a hell of a lot of stories. These stories will not be handwritten, and they will not be for someone else. These stories will be for me - me, alone - because no-one else is here to tell them, and no-one else is around to salvage my name.
