Author’s Note: I got busy yesterday and didn’t post this yesterday. My intention is to post a short story I have written on Saturdays.
Image found on on Harvard edu.
Fuck cancer, Olivia Mason thought as she slid the last of the packing tape across a Dole canned peaches box. The peaches were gone, stacked on a dusty shelf in the bodega she got the box from. Now it contained the last of her husband’s belongings—cherished relics of their twenty-year marriage stored away, ready to collect its own dust in her Bed-Stuy storage unit fifteen minutes away. The rest would go to the local thrift shop to find a new home with another man who shared similar tastes with Davis. Olivia sat back on her knees and clamped her teeth over her lip. Two years had passed since Davis lost his battle with cancer. The weight of her pain still bore down on her like a ton of bricks. She stared at the box and resisted the urge to dig her nails into the tape and tear it open, freeing his things so she could put them back where they belonged. And they belonged in the dresser drawer next to her stuff or hanging in the closet beside the clothes she still wore.
The closet in their bedroom—her bedroom now—used to brim with their clothes. Davis’ t-shirts. Their jackets. Her shoes. Now it seemed odd, with only her wardrobe filling half the space. The gaps were a constant reminder that Davis was gone, and she was truly alone for the first time in twenty years.
“I’m getting it done, doing what you told me to do,” Olivia spoke into the quiet of her empty apartment.
She recalled the conversation she had with Doctor Johns, her long-time therapist, during their last session. She wandered around his small office, fiddling with the various decorations and paperweights he had displayed around the room like a grown-up scavenger hunt. He had sat in his usual armchair by the window across from the plush slate sofa he always invited her to sit on when she visited him. She could feel his watery, gray eyes following her around as she ran her hand over a set of books before her fingers danced along the edges of a small statue of a bird he kept on the shelf.
“Tell me what’s got you all worked up today, Liv” Doctor Johns said as he flipped to a blank page in his legal pad.
“I’m not worked up,” Olivia snapped, turning around to face him. “I mean, I’m fine,” she amended.
“Have a seat, I promise the sofa won’t bite.” His lips curved into a warm smile, and he motioned for her to sit.
Olivia sighed and shuffled to the sofa. She wasn’t ready to face her therapist, but she paid him for the hour, and she couldn’t avoid him forever—they met every Wednesday, 4:30 sharp.
“You had some homework last week. How is that going?”
Olivia placed her hand on her thighs; her eyes darted away from his for a moment. Doctor Johns always called his assignments homework—little tasks she was supposed to do between sessions and report her progress to him during the next visit. When she first started seeing him, he encouraged her to keep a journal; this time, he asked her to begin de-Davising her Bed-Stuy walk-up. Well, he hadn’t called it de-Davising. That was the name she’d given this last assignment.
“You mean getting rid of Davis’ stuff?”
Doctor Johns laid his pen on the empty page and studied her. “Is that how you think of it?”
She hated it when he did that—responding to her question with one of his own. “Well, isn’t that what you wanted me to do?”
“That’s one interpretation, yes,” he said, raising his shaggy, gray eyebrows. “But that wasn’t the totality of the assignment.”
Oliva sighed and gripped her knees. He was right. Doctor Johns suggested she clean her apartment after she told him she sometimes felt choked by Davis’s presence. He was everywhere: the closet, their bathroom with the double vanity, the living room, the kitchen, and, most of all, their bedroom. It was hard to move on when his things still occupied the spaces that he no longer his. Having him there comforted her. She liked to grab one of his soft, well-worn t-shirts and inhale the lingering scent of his cologne; other times, having his things around—but not him—was like reopening a fresh wound.
She had turned their apartment into a shrine dedicated to him. When she had let Doctor Johns in on that secret, he had focused on helping her move forward. Olivia started small, removing his medications from the cabinet in the bathroom and taking them to the pharmacy so they could dispose of them. She threw away his toothbrush and shaving kit—though he rarely used it after his last bout of chemo. She sorted his things, marking which items she’d store and which she’d donate to charity. The objective was to keep one box of his while making room for herself. Davis was gone, and this was her new normal.
“I threw his toothbrush away,” she muttered and looked away.
“That’s a start!” Doctor Johns’ eyes brightened with encouragement, giving Olivia the strength to keep going.
“And I cleared out his medicine and shaving stuff.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Like shit,” Olivia answered, her response terse and automatic.
“Good. There’s no shame in how you’re feeling, Liv. Feeling like shit is valid. Losing a loved one is shitty, and it hurts. And you are entitled to feel any way you want about it.”
Olivia looked up at her therapist’s crinkled face, and her lips curved into a watery smile. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Six months had passed since that last visit. Olivia hadn’t planned on skipping the rest of her therapy, but she hadn’t been ready to move on—not right then. But two years was a long time to hold on to a ghost. No matter how much of Davis she kept around, he wasn’t ever coming back. She’d never see him walk through their door with his broad, boyish smile and windblown curls again. She’d never hear his voice as he rattled off some facts from an article he had read or told her about an obscure video he found on YouTube. There was a finality to death that not even the scent of his t-shirt could remedy.
So, after months of putting it off, Olivia had done the inevitable. She cajoled Sal at the bodega to give her a couple of free boxes and began the long, heartbreaking process of de-Davising her apartment.