Hello dear one,
I’ll be honest with you—I’ve got a longer bit of writing coming your way and it isn’t this one. Actually, I’ve got a few bits of writing coming your way, but the thing is they all need more time than my Tuesday night deadline allows for. However, I’m not a huge fan of these lulls between us, and wanted to let you know I’m thinking of you.
I’ve had this piece weighing in my pocket for a few years now. In fact, when I first started this newsletter, I intended to make this the very second or third thing I’d ever put into it, but the subject matter made me nervous, so I ended up backing out and posting something else. I remember this piece whenever winter rolls around, but another topic seems to always be pulling at my shirt sleeve. I’ve been thinking recently about this time, this version of myself—newly independent, pained but grateful, trying to understand my own solitude and selfhood—and don’t want her to live at the bottom of my draft folder forever. So though it feels weird to send this out when I feel so far from where I was here, I know it was still true at one time, and I’ll have the bravery to post it for me now.
I’ll see you next time with something new. <3 but for the moment,
Your winter sweater, exchanged between us for every Christmas event and ugly sweater party—any cold morning at the office when I wanted something warm to wrap myself in and smell you on the collar. An old pair of sleeves quietly tucked in the corner of my Goodwill pile.
When I write about you, I feel it’s more symbolism for what all of this could mean instead of what it is. I question why I write about these happenings at all; as if I’m only a tourist to my own experience. As if this feeling of detachment makes what happened any less valid—but I know it is still mine to write. In the more cinematic depictions of divorce, you’d imagine tearfully pulling frames from the wall, books from the shelf, a mattress shedding the bedsheets bought together; painfully reducing what’s left of a love—what’s left of a life together—to a Payless shoe box. Perhaps, behind a closed door, a forlorn lover stows away a CD, a coaster, an artifact for the scrapbook, just enough to serve as evidence this was all something once.
In truth, I pull the sweater from the bottom rib of the closet and, for a moment, forget it was ever yours. The corners of my lips crease when I think, in joy: the last of you! Here it is! The very last possession you could claim. Look at its place beside a chipped coffee mug and snow boots one size too big. The last thing I have to say you were ever here. Look at how freeing it feels to give away.
As I stand to haul the bag over my shoulder, I notice the nightstand.
The nightstand. The teak cupboard. The gifted casserole dish and mixing bowls. The bed frame twisted out of place in a terrifying bout of sleepwalking. Fuck.
How fitting that the message here is wanting to say I’ve emptied all I’ve carried from this, until it’s 4PM at work and my muscle memory sprouts a sick sweat in my hands. My fingers slip from the keyboard and I know the day’s almost over without ever looking up. A pattern built in wondering which version of you I’d come home to. It’s embarrassingly on the nose that it took this long for me to see. I’ve been so defiant in defending my life has been scrubbed clean of you, I trip over my own name. How desperate I’ve become for finality; I count eggs before the chicken’s ever bought.
The sweater swings from a paper bag looped through my handlebar on the bike ride across town. I will let this be one more thing to wave goodbye to. Someone will pull this bundle of knitted fabric off a hanger and be none the wiser. Someone will pay $6.50 for it at the counter, take it home, and wear it for the first snow come November. Maybe again at a stale office Christmas party that December, spilling root beer on the sleeve. Given long enough, the memory wears. They’ll forget. At some point, it’ll feel like it has always been theirs.
with love,
schuyler (sky-ler)
hot cocoa fund (venmo): schuylerpeck
If you’re interested in supporting my writing or reading more:
book link 1: To Hold Your Moss-Covered Heart
book link 2: You Look Like Hell
book link 3: The Ghosts’ Share of Rent (pre-orders)
instagram: hiitssky