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“Deal.”
“Really?” Keegan asked in surprise, her head jerking up.
“Really,” Julia replied. “I will go. I won’t complain. I’ll blow her socks off, and then you don’t get to ask me to do this anymore!”
“That did not take nearly as much convincing as I had planned,” she laughed. Then, lunging for her all at once, Keegan shouted, “You’re the best!”
“But!” Julia interrupted.
“Ugh.”
“It’s not happening next week. I have too much going on right now.”
“Fine,” she conceded.
After a little while, Keegan left with the usual hug, another murmured apology, and a see you tomorrow. For once, she longed for the silence that followed the door closing. For once, she was okay with it.
She sat back on the white couch, pouring herself the remaining wine as she looked at the walls. She held the cold glass to her lips as she thought. Grabbing a clip from the drawer in the coffee table, she twisted her hair into a bun.
Keegan was right. It was time. It’d been time.
She stood with the glass in her hands, her toes curled into the fuzzy gray run beneath her feet. She was frozen with fear, her body filled with lead. Taking a second to gather her wits, she walked back to the foyer where a light on the wall gleamed into the entryway. She approached the side table and opened the top drawer again. The envelope, that damn envelope that sealed her fate.
She wasn’t defeated; she was bankrupt in an eternal struggle of negative worth–too far gone, too deep to crawl out. She had no fight left in her, but she couldn’t keep going on like she was. She couldn’t keep putting someone, something else first, that no longer existed. She couldn’t hold her heart in a glass case, locked with steel chains, for someone who’d never come back to finally release it.
She had no reason to continue holding onto that envelope like it meant something, like it would change anything. So, with shaking hands, she picked it up and held it before her.
This was goodbye.
Inside it felt like her wounds were still fresh–aching with every move as bruised tissues expanded with each breath–but as she opened that front door, wrapped herself with her sweater and once again began walking to that mailbox, it ached a little less. It was like a single stitch arched across and slowly willed it closed.
She placed the envelope in the chilled metal and raised that flag again. She closed the lid, her finger lingering just for a moment. This was goodbye. She breathed deeply as her hands fell to her sides. Swirls of her warm breath danced above her.
She turned and faced the moonlit night–her face a beacon for the light year distance of a future life shining down on her. It wasn’t a sad gasp of air, but a breath of relief. It was the feeling of shackles breaking and crashing to the floor as you finally have the freedom to step forward.
Julia walked to the kitchen, a slight sway in her step. She reached for the wine cooler and pulled out another bottle. She didn’t need another, but she wanted it for what was to come next.
She tilted her overly full drink to her mouth, splashing a little wine on her shirt. Instead of changing it, she clumsily tore it off, exposing her black sports bra and loose fit jeans hanging off her hips. She threw the t-shirt onto the chaise, her chest rising with her expanding lungs. Now she faced the project she wasn’t entirely talked into.
She had to do it, and she had to do it right at that moment.
Regretfully, she set down her glass again and went to the basement to pull out a box. She reached for the tape hanging in the stairwell on her way down. Pulling the deconstructed box from the corner, she taped the bottom. After dragging it back up those stairs–the thudding ringing in her hazy ears as it hit each step–she threw it on the floor in what she figured would be the center of the house, the flaps opened wide.
One-by-one, she walked through each room pulling pictures off the wall, from shelves and tables. She took the photos tucked between books on the oak shelf in the living room. She took down every moment that lined the hallway.
She opened the drawer of her bedside table and removed the picture of Marin she used to look at before drifting into sleep. Her twenty-eight-year-old smile was so genuinely sincere, caught off guard as she admired the relentless gray waves on a beach off the Jersey Shore.
She piled them into the box, checking every surface for lingering lost memories. At what seemed like a lifetime later, she fell backwards on the couch and picked her wine back up.
The walls looked so bare. It wasn’t a natural look–not the way protruding tree trunks blend into the rough terrain in the forest–and it bothered her already. But at the same time, it was a weight lifted off her shoulders, as if the empty walls filled part of that empty space within her.
When she walked back to the box, she slowly closed the lid–the velvet feeling of the cardboard grazing across skin. She taped it up, and then added another layer, just because. Carefully, she dragged it down the stairs to the basement.
Dim light crept in through the only slanted window. A single cobweb she hadn’t demolished yet clung to the corner, the only life left there. Decorations in labeled totes lined the wall, dust covering their lids. They hadn’t been opened in a year, or had it been longer than that? When was the last time that garland hung from the mantels, cheery red and green colors reflecting soft light off the muted walls?
She pushed the heavy box a little further into the corner and left it there. As she turned the light off and made her way back up the stairs, the last step always creaking under her weight, she didn’t look back.
The empty walls–the paint color just slightly unmatched where the same pictures hung for years, shielding the layers from the light–didn’t bother her as much as she feared. The emptiness wasn’t as loud as she expected; it was a trickling river, white noise soothing her soul.
