The Drawer People

The Drawer People

“We should get up,” Marcus said, lifting his head, parting it from mine.

“Yeah, we really should,” I replied, wrapping my arm around his waist anyway.

“That was mean.”

We stayed there another minute, maybe two.

“Alright, alright.” He lifted my arm from around him and stood. “If we stay here any longer, this is gonna become a thing.”

He gave me a half smile and winked. He turned on the closet light, pulled on sweatpants, a shirt, a jacket, then tossed my clothes onto the bed.

“I’m gonna make a beer run,” he said, pulling on his boots. “When I get back, we’ve gotta rally.”

Then he was gone, out of his cozy apartment and out into into the Michigan cold.

This was new for Marcus. He had just began his job as a Coach at University of Michigan.

Which is weird because nothing about Marcus screamed Michigan. He radiated South Florida man-whore energy, but the kind who wore Patagonia and tried to pass as a wholesome suburban dog dad who knew something about whiskey.

Yet here he was with an electric fireplace and 4-wheel drive Nissan.

I was only here for 4 days and with the recent stress of our jobs we had pinky swore we were committing to a bender. We had been drunk for two days. We went to football games, to dinner places, the clubs, to small bars where we sat and talked till 3 am. I wish I could tell you that I was approaching my limit. I was not.

I stayed in bed a few moments longer, staring at the large mirror across from the bed. In the bottom right corner, taped neatly where it wouldn’t interfere with his reflection, was his dad’s obituary.

I glanced over it—dates, name, the finality of it—then shuffled into my clothes.

I let Ellie out of her cage—his suburban dog daughter. I grabbed a toy and waved it around. I zig-zagged my way through the small apartment. I tossed it in the air and watched her pounce then moved on to start cleaning the kitchen. I opened cabinets, put dishes away, and tried to learn the logic of where things belonged.

That’s when I opened a lower drawer to the right of the sink.

Inside was a Ziploc bag. Inside the bag were photographs—his father, him, the two of them together, his family all together. I paused. Marcus looked a lot like him. All the individual parts of his face looked different, but all together created a familiar symmetry.

I wondered how similar they were in other ways.

I thought about the obituary in the mirror. The pictures in the drawer.

You’d think that it would be nicer to have the pictures out, to remember him, truly. But Marcus wasn’t interested in remembering, he was interested in honoring, he was interested in control.

The photographs were different. They captured moments before loss—his father’s arm around his shoulders, a smile that assumed continuation. Left out in the open, they would turn ordinary mornings into negotiations with grief.

The obituary didn’t change. It didn’t reach back. It was finished, and there was relief in that. He could face every morning and acknowledge it without being pulled apart.

He liked the words, the facts; Marcus Verus—April 20th, 1970 to March 20th 2007.

Marcus would have been about 8 years old when he passed away. His father, 36.

Which means at the age of eight, he learned that love does not protect anything from ending. Eight, when the world taught him that attachment taxes the cost of loss.

At eight, Marcus walked into a funeral filled with more grief than he had ever seen concentrated in one place.

At eight, he saw his first dead body. His first dead body was his father. A few days earlier, that body had been a person—someone who held thoughts, feelings, and affection meant specifically for Marcus. And then it wasn’t. Just like that it was all gone, like smoke in the air, it all disappeared like it never existed.

At eight years old, Marcus felt the guttural pain that comes with sudden existential awareness—the moment when the world stops being abstract and becomes fragile. He felt the unfamiliar ache of naivety dying. What he wouldn’t give to go back a few days, to the version of himself who didn’t yet know how abruptly things could end.

That same year, he watched his mother break in front of him in a way no child should have to witness. He held her hand. He grew up. He learned how to be careful around grief that had nowhere productive to go. He watched her change, and he changed with her.

Marcus and his mother don’t get along particularly well now. The details are blurred, but the shape of it remains: she is hardheaded, explosive. Home never felt like a place to rest. He learned early how to stay gone.

Marcus learned from a young age it’s nearly impossible to admire something, to want it, to love it, and for it to walk away unscathed.

To hold something in any meaningful way is to leave a bruise.

To an extent, Marcus is afraid of getting hurt. But more so, I think he’s afraid of hurting others. Hurting in the way that he was. In the way his mom did. His family.

He loves to feel needed. But hates to be depended on. His way of loving does not leave fingerprints.

Marcus wants a family. He wants a partner. He wants kids. But experience tells him the antithesis is most likely much kinder in its existential definition. Much kinder to everyone except himself.

In Marcus’s mind, distance was kindness. Silence was restraint. He believed that wanting less was the same thing as hurting less.

So he learned to keep the photographs in the drawer.

And everything else—partners, futures, promises—just close enough to honor, but never close enough to lose.

I recognized the instinct immediately.

The drawer.

The careful distance.

The difference was, I told myself it was a choice.

I told myself that I didn’t want one person to love.

I told myself that I could get my love from a million different people, a million different ways. And that part is true.

But there in that moment, I was sure it wasn’t a choice for Marcus. At least not one that he was consciously making. I wondered if it was less of a choice for me than I thought.

I wondered how many times you could call something intentional before it becomes inherited.