Lindsey Markel Writes About True Things

We’re moving in August. The first time that we planned to move out was last year; we shrugged at each other when the question of lease renewal came up, and then a couple weeks later, Larry found me crying on the floor of my closet instead of cleaning it, like I’d said i would be doing. I looked up at him, a pile of myself, and said What if we don’t find a place we like better? and he said, Well, we might not. The night before we moved in three years ago, we crept to the windows in the side yard and peered inside, giddy at the emptiness of the rooms. our first apartment together, this place with huge windows rigged with rope to let the light spill in, nailed-together wood floors that swell with the seasons and creak when Izzy roams at night.

But now it’s this year, and there’s a house fifteen minutes away with space to plant a small garden. There’s enough room for Larry and I each to claim our own working space, and for Sydney to have his own bedroom. We can park our cars in a garage when we come home in the cold months, and for the first time in years, I’ll be able to crawl into a hot bath at any point of any day. We signed the lease and then sat there, grinning at each other. That night, i wrote down my fears about leaving. I was scared that we’d lose the sense of home that we built up here, together, these past three years. I worried that the new house would be too much space, too many rooms, and I felt mournful at the idea of leaving our apartment in its small, candlelit coziness, as if a larger place would take the air out of our home, our friendship or our love. The fear of loss felt immediate, and even though I knew it wasn’t a realistic fear, I still wrote it down on paper so I could face it myself and size it up.

There’s this rule of thumb in acting that says when you’re in a scene with only one other person—say, you’re doing dishes while the other character clears the table behind you—you shouldn’t move to look at that person every time you have a line. Two people who are used to being in a room together don’t need to make eye contact every time they speak to one another; they just talk, then listen, in their naturally learned rhythms. They co-exist, so they’re familiar. That’s what living with this man, my best friend, feels like. I’ll be twenty-seven when we move into our house and that familiarity with him, in our home, has been the context for my early twenties. My last semester of college, I would sit at my cheap dorm room desk after lunch and e-mail Larry, telling him what hilarious and interesting things I’d said in class that day, and how tired I was from too much homework or too many dollar pitchers of beer the night before.

Tonight he recorded a drummer in our shared studio/office while I finished reading a novel in our bed, on the other side of the door. I checked my email at my desk while he made a spaghetti dinner in the kitchen, clanking dishes and talking to Izzy. Then we ate together at our kitchen table, which we picked up three years ago from a Craigslist listing, when we carried each chair down a flight of stairs one by one. Before we’d left the house to pick up the set, I’d said to Larry I feel afraid that they’ll take up too much room in here and he had shrugged and said, Yeah, I do too. But they fit perfectly into our space, and we ate our spaghetti plates clean tonight, in those kitchen chairs tucked caddycorner to the pantry and small humming refrigerator. Afterward, Larry took our empty water glasses to the sink and wiped down the counters as I washed our plates. The radio was on and between the stretches of content, working silence between us, we kept suddenly singing along, out loud and in unison, happy just being with each other in the room full of music.

(Originally published on youareamongfriends.com)