The Woman Before Me

I still get your letters.

The first year, I started collecting them in a small wooden box I'd bought at a flea market in Seattle, long before either of us had anything to do with this house. It was painted with a large tribal fish, faded at the fins, and I never found a real use for it — I imagined it once held dried fish, shipped somewhere, sold somewhere, emptied and forgotten somewhere. It felt like the right place for your letters. Unopened. Waiting. In case you ever came back for them.

I never opened one, though sometimes I was tempted, turning an envelope over in my hands, my fingers creeping towards the seal. Mail, for me, came infrequently, and when it did, it was usually flyers — pizza joints, window cleaners, local politicians and bills. Rarely did I get letters. Yours came in square envelopes instead of rectangular ones, like the bills always did, and the surprise of that shape in the stack of takeout menus and junk was always, quietly, welcomed. Addressed to a person instead of a household.

We never met, although I've imagined you more times than I could count. Older than me, but not by much. Long blonde hair, brushed but slightly unkempt. I wonder if you held the same pause I do, some mornings, when your eyes met the tri-fold mirror in the bathroom — the one I painted a bright, defiant yellow — sometimes unsure of the woman looking back at you. I've stood there some nights not recognizing my own face, and wondered if the house remembers that from you too, if it's absorbed that particular kind of looking the way it's absorbed sound and light.

I know you had two children, because their beds were still in the attic when I toured the semi-empty house. Two twin frames, side by side, the same size, close enough that I imagined them once pushed together — a compromise between two kids who didn't want to be far from each other but also didn't want to admit it. From time to time I still find pieces of glitter worked into the carpet fibers, and once, a small Lego brick, blue, buried so deep I had to dig it out with my fingernail. I have vacuumed that carpet at least fifty times, and I am still discovering little treasures from their childhood.

You left a box of wrapping paper in the downstairs closet, and it turned out to be a kind of ledger — a record of the moments you'd needed paper for. My favorite, a pale blue with small dancing lambs, read you are 1 in looping script. I wonder who was 1, and what their life looks like now — if they're twenty-something and have no memory of the lambs at all, if they'd be strange to think a stranger kept the paper their first birthday came wrapped in. I used the paper until it was gone — two Christmas rolls, one blue roll covered small trucks, and one plain pink. I wrapped gifts for people in my life who will never know the paper was chosen by someone else. Your choices are still moving through the world, dressing up boxes for people you'll never meet.

You took the porch swing — the one I so admired in the listing photos, the one that made me picture myself on it before I'd even seen the rest of the house — but you left the chains. I hooked a new, smaller swing onto them. Just right for one. Some evenings I imagine you and your husband out there, swinging slowly in the cool late air while the boys were tucked in behind you, the whole house dark except for one window, the porch light on for no one but yourselves. Sometimes I hear the chains creak and pull while I'm reading out there, and I can't tell if it's the wind or the weight or if it's some version of you, still keeping the habit long after the swing itself is gone.

I recently moved the stove in a cleaning fit and found a recipe taped behind it — Swedish meatballs, torn from the New York Times, wrapped in its own wrinkles, gone soft and yellow at the edges. There was a red circle drawn around the title in pen, the kind of mark that means this one, make this one, don't lose this one. I don't know if you made it once and loved it, or if you meant to and never got the chance — if the recipe outlived its own occasion. Either way, I love that you had the magazine delivered here, into the same mailbox where your letters still arrive, and that you pulled this one page out of it thinking someone in your family might like it. I keep recipes too. I dog-ear the corners of the pages instead of circling them, a whole different grammar for the same impulse. But Swedish meatballs are a recipe built for a family, and cooking for one, they're always too many. I've made them exactly once, and frozen the rest, and eaten them slowly over weeks, portion by portion, until they were gone. They never tasted as good reheated.

The echoes of your family's voices have softened — not gone, just quieter. But I still see you sometimes. When I carry the sheets up the stairs and notice the dings in the wall from when you were moving something large and awkward up there — a dresser, maybe, or a crib, something too big for the stairwell and too important to leave behind. Or when I open the pantry closet and see the pencil marks where you tracked the boys' growth, dates beside initials, and I wonder how tall they are now, whether they still fit in any doorway, whether they even remember this house at all or if it's just a photograph to them now, a place their mother used to talk about.

I have my own marks in this house too, though I don't write them down. A coffee ring on the counter I've never wiped all the way out. A chair by the window where I sit most mornings before work, in the same three minutes of quiet, doing nothing in particular. I moved here after something ended — and some days I think I chose this house because it already knew how to hold an ending. It had practice. It had you.

Our lives are very different, I'm sure. I don't know your face, whether you're even still married, whether the boys or men. Strangers, people with their own houses and their own dings in their new walls. But I like the idea of us somehow living, at different times, as two women in a space that is scared of nothing and holds everything anyway.

I had a dog here once, and I know you did too — his nail marks are still scattered across the faded wood floors near the back door, matched now by the ones my dog Lloyd left, so that if you looked closely you'd see two different dogs' whole lives layered into the same boards, walking the same path to the same door for different reasons, years apart. His ashes are buried in the backyard, next to the daisies you planted. I weed around them almost every morning, and sometimes I think about why you chose that spot for daisies, whether you ever imagined that patch of ground would end up holding someone else's oldest friend.

I think, too, about the nights my body has met the floor — unable to hold itself together — and I wonder if you ever crouched in that same spot, in some earlier version of this same despair, holding yourself together while everything inside you came loose. After all these years, there are only a few places in this house I can say with confidence have never met a tear of mine. I wonder if yours are in the same places. I wonder if grief, like water, always finds the same low corners of a room, no matter who's living in it.

I still don't open your letters. I don't think I ever will. But I keep them, in the fish box, on the shelf where you can't see them, and I try not to look too often either. As long as they're unopened, you're still a person who might come back for them. As long as I don't know your face, you could be anyone.

When I move away from this home, I imagine I'll be someone else's ghost too. Some woman I'll never meet will find something I left behind — wrapping paper, a chipped mug, a mark on a wall I never noticed I was making — and she'll wonder about me the way I wonder about you. I hope she's kind about it. I hope my life warrants kindness.

I hope she keeps whatever she finds, even the sad parts, even the parts that were never meant to be found, the way I kept yours.

I won't get to say goodbye to this house. That isn't how it works. One day I'll just be somewhere else, and the daisies will keep coming back whether I'm here to weed around them or not, and Lloyd's ashes will stay in the ground under some other woman's version of a morning. I think that's the part I'm not ready for — not the leaving, but the not-knowing what happens after, the way you never got to know what happened after you.

I hope, wherever you are now, that you have a porch, and a dog, and somewhere quiet enough to put yourself back together when you need to. I hope you never come back down this street. I hope if you did, some part of you would still recognize the house, and some part of you wouldn't, and that would be enough of an ending for both of us — letters unopened.