Billy Joel

“Well, well,” said he, “do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of them.”

—Pride and Prejudice, Ch. 48

I pluck a book off its place on the shelf. I crack open a novel that is to be packed away and take a quick peak inside. That accidental distraction of moving and cleaning: reading.

The sound of the movers is a movement in a sonata, soothing sounds of trucks backing up, the cacophony of the NYC street turns into one of those 20th century, avant-garde pieces by bizarre composers who spend two hours destroying whole orchestras’ worth of instruments and call it music:

Thus is the construction going on over at the building across the street from my window: 

a thousand hammers and helmets; so many welders and sparks as to create a firefall—a volcano’s fiery plum flowing as freely down its rocks as water down the cliffs of the Amazon driver: 

he walks underneath the building scaffolding, airpods in his ears: delivering a package to the porch of the townhouse next door.

Old memories rise up like the dust behind the dresser as it’s moved. Up until now, I have not been moved by sadness, but now the finality is pushing forward. I feel time moving on without a hitch. 

Nothing is going wrong. Unfortunately, the buyer has not pulled out last minute. I won’t be able to stay in the room with a tree outside its window. I will see no more birds nest there. They will sing their songs for someone else.

I hate that whoever lives here next will have a happier life than me, a more loving family than me. Neither are hard to best.

When I am settled, when I feel more sane and less gaslit, I will look up the name of my ex-boyfriend’s wife. I will find her number and call her. I’ll let her know that, at least, for the first few years of their marriage, he was cheating on her with me.

All throughout their dating, all throughout their engagement, the second they were back from their honeymoon, and even until their child was two or three. He would come down from wherever they lived in MA and meet me in New York City just to kiss me.

If she ever wondered where he was, he was there, with me; or with his other ex-girlfriend. And that he didn’t stop seeing me until their son or daughter was two or three. I think he might have kept up with Poodle Head longer.

I’ll let her know that he’s exactly like what she already, in her heart, knows he’s like, but:

I want to live rent free in her mind the way she did in mine when he married her.

He’s an asshole, but I always wished, and he always strung me along with saying he was getting better. He said he was learning his lessons, learning to be more emotionally open. He wanted me to be there when it finally happened because he wanted it to be me. 

His other gf believed him, too, for a long while.

He told me he needed his wife because she was more gentle. She didn’t write about the other men she had dated before him. She didn’t make money from being her publisher’s best selling author in romance. She treated him as the sole meaning of her existence. 

The same as the other girlfriend he had dated through out all of high school. She cared about nothing, but his football games, his stats, and the future of his football career; which he would quit his freshman year of college.

I remember her fists in my hair as she slammed my head into a locker. She was livid in loss. I would be sitting in the bleachers with his mom and his wife-beating father, watching his game. It was her place, she felt, and then, I, the silky-haired, fat childhood friend had taken it away from her.

I might have seen even half of a game or none. His father felt I was not enthusiastic enough to watch one. If I didn’t give up everything about myself, how could I possibly appreciate how great of a football player he was? How could I be the support he needed to get into the NFL?

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An FBI agent was investigating the crime ring that was trafficking me while he was cheating on you. I left your husband for him because that agent told me, when the case was closed, that he would marry me; that he laid in bed every night thinking of me; that when the case was getting too stressful, he comforted himself with the thought of us married, with lying next to one another in bed. He told me when he fell asleep, he would dream about me.

He found me gentle for defending the other women and children in that prison, for disrupting those terrorists’ supply chain of drugs by lighting the monton of pot and coke on fire, by teaching the children the languages of their other captures in other houses, so that they might listen in, speak with one another, and escape.

And for stabbing a lot of their upper echelon to death or incapacity long enough that others were able to safely get away.

He thought I was gentle because I shook like a leaf filled with fear in autumn winds; I knew that every day might be my last. 

He thought I was gentle when with quivering lips, I quietly spoke:

I’m terrified they’re going to damage me. I take the whip to my jaw for the children, but I’ve seen it rip others’ off. The last time, it hurt so bad, I looked to the wall in the direction where the whip would have flung it, and didn’t realize until I touched my face that it was still on my head. When he finally takes it off me, they won’t be able to sell me anymore, except for the execution vid, and that will be the end for me forever.

No hope of red leaves returning to my broken lips, those could heal. But to lose them completely was to lose hope of seeing next autumn. A broken toy with parts missing only gets thrown away.

Like moving furniture that is taken apart and transported to some dump, not looked nor cared for, having often times served its purpose as a man’s vessel for his goods, but more often as a hiding spot, in which, to store his evils; a broken doll never to be found and along with my fellow women, whose eyes had turned glassy and grey, to be buried beneath the trash heaps.

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I sit in my room as the men mill about, taking away grand couches and finer things than would belie the low state where to my parents’ neglect and my abusive ex-boyfriend’s apathy had once brought me.

I resent the rehash and review he made of me, of all his past relationships, actually.

I was a palate cleanser, an after dinner mint to him. Someone he would return to after a break-up to reestablish his ego, to feel safe, and to not feel threatened enough to necessitate a reformation of his character and poor conduct.

The sounds of trucks and men speaking Spanish comfort me. It’s a New York lullaby. It is such a soft, soothing, no:

It is moving, written like a sonata, composed, by a playwright put away like Tennessee Williams. So much so, that I cry as I pack away the classic romances I loved and returned to, again and again, into some dingy box to be forgotten in our garage in our house in a new country far from the prisons my abusers are packed in.