Symbolic Purchases

A little bit more to get you from my landing to now...

The day after I caught my husband was a Sunday, and I called Maggen. The one thing to know about Maggen is that she is my family - nearly in it's entirety. I met her when I was 21 and she was 18, working at a pizza place. She is, and has been since the day I met her, the person that makes me feel the most alive.

My first tangible act of revolt - before I bought the tickets, before I definitely-definitely decided on coming out here - was buying a suitcase.

I always wanted those hard cases... The kind that were more common in the 60's and 70's, the kind you see going around the conveyer belt at the airport with all sorts of stickers on them from the carrier's travels.

A few days after this whole thing was set in motion, I went and bought one at a thrift store an acquaintance of mine works at. It was sort of symbolic... I had never gotten one before for a few reasons:

1). I had been on a plane exactly twice in my life, and very few weekend trips.
2). As odd as it may sound, to me it seems like the sort of thing a person can only have if they're going someplace... Like a passport.
3). When Rick and I picked out luggage ( because everyone should have them, nevermind whether or not they use them) he hated the idea of a hard case. Said they were tacky. And so, we ended up with two camel rollers that were used once to go to stay overnight in Baltimore for his sister's wedding.

This is part of the reason I ended up not taking much, ultimately. So few of the things in my house felt like mine. My dog, a few framed photos, some clothes, my straightening iron, a negligee Maggen once talked me into buying ( but I never wore), some books and DVDs. Everything else in my house was exclusively Rick-style. And I will die a happy woman if I never again own anything beige, camel, sand, khaki, off-white, etc. etc. etc.

So I managed to find an old robin-egg blue hard suitcase, which made my decision for me. If I bought this lovely item, I would have to take it somewhere. So purchasing it, for me, was more or less a promise.


So right now, I'm living with Maggen. That was something we decided on post suitcase purchase, and pre-confrontation.

She lives in a two bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, and I adore the building. It's 80 years old, there's a fire-escape that reminds me of "Pretty Woman", and she has 8 million windchimes hanging on her balcony (I was never allowed to have one in my old house).

It's messy, it's colorful, it smells like apples, and I am absolutely in love with it.

The first week I was here, I didn't really leave the apartment. Maggen went to work ( she's an assistant for some nightmare-of-a-woman at a studio) during the day, and at night we would watch movies and talk. I spent the days without her watching T.V. I think mostly I just needed as low-key an activity as possible, so that I could fully let my brain wrap around where I was and what I'm doing before I could venture outside.

By about ten days ago, we had talked so much I was.. Over it. Not over the situation, just fucking over talking about it. ( And again, let me reiterate - in these first couple of entries I'm talking a lot about my husband just for backstory - that's not what I want this to be about).

So I started venturing out a little bit.

Last Monday, Mag went into work a little late so we could go to this little farmer's market they hold in this park a neighborhood away. Believe it or not, I had never actually been to a farmer's market before. You could write an entire novella just about the characters there... The grizzled old man who plays guitar and sells sprouts, the grumpy old Russian men arguing over fish, the ways people try to make their strawberries stick out from everybody else's.

I bought a bed ( I suppose I should point out that part of what makes this adventure possible, was Rick's insistance that we always keep seperate savings accounts). It's the first bed I ever bought for myself. There is this terrible local commercial with this hideous elf-man screaming about his mattress store... And so I gave in, drove Mag to work and ventured into one of his mattress stores. I bought myself a full size, and am thoroughly enjoying sleeping in the middle of it without any real space for another human being.

I bought sheets - these amazingly soft, lavender sheets. I could seriously write an entire sonnet just about my love affair with these sheets.

Equally important, I went to Petco and bought Murray blue bowls and a little plaid bed.

I've spent the past ten days taking little walking excursions as a warm up. On one walk, I went into this little boutique and got myself this amazing magenta lamp with beads hanging off the shade.

So when I walk into my bedroom now, there aren't that many possessions, but they're mine. I have my little lavendar bed, Murray's bed, a nightstand Maggen let me have with a couple of books and my lamp on it, a closet with alarmingly few clothes, and one, hard, suitcase. I cannot wait to fill the room.