A Medium curated essay
Andy and I started to fall apart in 2013. That next year, I left him. I’ll never forget sitting him down on that brown leather couch he adored so damn much. I felt as though I was on the brink of a panic attack, and he reassured me that everything was going to be okay. He was telling me to breathe… while I broke up with him.
We had been together for four years and living together for three. We had fun (a lot of it) especially those first few years. That old apartment had seen us dance around the living room in the wee hours of the morning. It’d seen us pee on each other in the shower (well, I tried my best) while The Wallflowers blasted from the speaker. It watched Andy lie on my lap while I ran my fingers through his hair and witnessed us binging episodes of The Wire, Breaking Bad, or Sons of Anarchy in that same spot. It surely wouldn’t forget when our neighbors were fighting, unsurprisingly, and the cops came knocking on our door instead of theirs by mistake. We sat there, in our pajamas, with an animated Christmas movie playing, and a warm plate of cookies on the coffee table. The cops looked at us, clearly not taking the environment into account:
“We heard there was a problem here?”
Andy and I couldn’t help but bust out in a laughing fit.
Living together after we broke up, as one might suspect, was a bit of a disaster. We had a couple months to get through after giving our landlord the notice. Not long before the first showing was scheduled, Andy came home drunk with a buddy of ours, realized he left his keys at the bar, and broke down the front door. Apparently that was a more rational option at the time than heading back to the bar to find his keys. In the years to come, this was always a great source of laughter for Andy and me. At the time of the broken door however, it was not. I was out of town and will never forget that phone call the next morning:
“Umm… I fucked up.”
Fortunately, as a carpenter, he was capable of fixing it with the help of an extra set of hands (mine). This was not the kind of chore one wants to deal with after separating from someone. Whether we were scurrying around each other in the mornings before work or filling the evenings with a stuffy, harsh silence, the space became uncomfortable. On one occasion his sister even mailed two separate event invitations to our address. Awkward.
A few dear friends had come to help us do our final move-out cleaning. Just as we were under the impression of being on our last scrubs throughout the space, Audrey opened the fridge. With a half-hearted chuckle, she turned to get our attention:
“Umm, kids…”
Andy and I looked over to see her reveal a filthy fridge not yet emptied of its contents. Once again, we had to laugh which helped cut through the otherwise relatively tense energy.
I’ll never forget walking out of that space for the last time. My friends ushered me out with a sense of urgency to assure that I didn’t take a long, dramatic moment and lose my shit (not that I would ever do such a thing). The Andy and Molls years, and our years of creating a life together in that space, was a difficult chapter to close.
I relived that memory and an abundance of others when passing by “the old apartment” five and a half years later. I had gone home to Wisconsin from San Diego for Christmas. It was 2019 — the year Andy died.
I had just gotten to Milwaukee and found myself driving straight to our old place. I stared out at the park across the street and then at that old rickety balcony of ours. After taking a couple pictures and lingering a bit, I went to my destination around the corner. When coming back to my car afterwards, there were two people standing out on the old balcony. I took out my headphones and looked up with a big smile:
“That was my old apartment years ago!”
The man peered down at me and warmly replied:
“We love it!”
I probably stood there longer than they had expected me to, or longer than I had realized. I was envisioning the space, and the years of Andy and I in it. I could feel my eyes starting to well, and my gaze once again met theirs with a grin:
“So did we.”
There was something in that moment. These folks had no idea what that space once meant to me or meant to me at the time, nor should they. There is an innocence in that and a comfort. That old apartment was nothing but walls comprising a dwelling, but it seemed to hold value to me at that time. It was a storage unit for both intimate and communal memories, for better or worse.
After moving out of that apartment in 2014, I relocated just a few blocks over. I recall standing in my new place after my friends had left, with a cluster of boxes sprawling out from the center of the main room. I collapsed in tears. I was alone in a new space and starting over. At that point, Andy and I decided to break off communication. This was challenging; we had a profound foundation, a plethora of mutual friends, and significant love for each other. These elements are probably why our time away didn’t last long! It also wasn’t long before we decided we had to take space, again, in an effort to rebuild a platonic “Andy and Moll.”
We did build that relationship, and successfully. Though that’s not to say we didn’t sleep together once, maybe twice, after that — we let ourselves off the hook for those; it was only human of us. We would have sleepovers where we’d watch movies together and he’d lounge wearing my lavender pajama pants. Or, we’d chain smoke cigarettes and drink copious amounts of Miller Lite and tequila on my balcony. We’d then retire to separate beds or only sleep beside each other but not together.
I think my favorite memories with him are in those more recent years after our relationship had become platonic. Don’t get me wrong. As I’ve mentioned, we had countless sweet memories while we were together and many of the piss-your-pants laughing variety. Yet as friends, we seemed to appreciate each other more. It takes a lot of foundation and a lot of love to develop the kind of relationship Andy and I had after separating. Patience, understanding, empathy, and compassion. Even forgiveness including the forgiveness of self, for what you had or hadn’t done, did or didn’t say. Also discipline — setting boundaries and acting with foresight. I think we were both grateful for the unique relationship we had developed and our commitment to sustaining it. We had worked for it, so we savored it.
Though Andy did have this way of looking at me in the years after we broke up, the way I imagine an old man looks at his wife of fifty years. It was as if to say “I know you to the darkest depths of your soul, and I love you unconditionally, still.” Maybe I’m just romanticizing that now that he’s gone, but that man made me feel as though I could do no wrong. He knew I loved him the same. His last words to me were just that — he loved me. I said I loved him too, unconditionally. Andy also often looked at me as if to say “I can’t believe you just fucking said that, Moll!” or “Ah, still capitalizing on shock value, huh Moll?” with a big smirk, a nod, and an incredibly endearing chuckle.
We spent most of our time in recent years at his apartment, a block over from our old place together. By then I had left Milwaukee to live nomadically out west, landing in San Diego a few years later. When I came back home to visit friends and family, I’d head to Andy’s. We’d stroll down the river walk or devour tacos and tequila around the corner, or head to one of our old favorite dives down the main drag.
The nights usually came to a close with me crashing on that same brown leather couch, waking later that morning with an awful hangover. That damn couch. The one we had broken up on, had made love on, the one where he’d lie his head on my lap, the spot we were sitting when my dad broke the news that he had cancer. Andy also had the same brown coffee table and end tables at his new place. It was all the furniture we once had together.
I remember his dad’s girlfriend telling me that the urn I picked out reminded her of all that brown furniture. Walking into that apartment was like walking back in time, every time, to another life. Oh, the stories that space could tell! There was the microwave with the “I Closed Wolski’s” sticker from the local dive we’d frequent across the park from our apartment. The Soundgarden poster and the PBR wall art collection I had surprised him with. The vintage ones with those damn ducks. I thought they were terribly cheesy and a little country for my taste yet also endearing because Andy’s eyes lit up with delight when I gifted them to him. He still kept a box of cream of wheat in the cupboard (gross), and I’m sure he still somehow ate a bowl while driving down the highway to work in a frenzy… long blonde hair in knots, windows down.
It might be a silly thing, how memories surface so vividly just from a glance at a handful of material objects in a familiar space. At the same time, it’s also sort of remarkable. Remarkable the weight that something so otherwise insignificant can carry. Like a Sangria bottle, just taking up space.
In late January of 2019, a month before I’d see Andy alive for the last time, he sent me a picture of a bottle of Sangria. He had been drinking it on that infamous couch. I chuckled because it was an odd thing for him to be consuming (not a wine guy) and also because he was wearing shorts — in January — in Wisconsin. I don’t remember if he called me or if I called him, but after that text, we chatted on the phone about his love life, then about my roommate, and I said something about the pint glass on the coffee table he had been drinking from. I had gotten us each one and still have mine. It has some bitchin’ bicycle art on it — Andy loved biking. I told him that I had a first date that night, with my now partner, Adam. I hadn’t told anyone else about it. Just Andy.
After he died not two months later, I flew into Milwaukee and his dad picked me up from the airport. He took me straight to Andy’s apartment. I stood in that living room, and there sat the empty Sangria bottle. In my mind, it was as though Andy had just finished it, set it down, and walked into the other room. He would be back in a second, right? It was as if none of it was real — even though I had just hysterically sobbed nearly the entire 2,000 mile journey. It was as though seeing the bottle actually made it real. But, it had competition: that damn couch.
The nostalgia this space once had for me had been wiped clean along with the apartment. Only a vaguely sterile smell, absent of Andy, remained. My thoughts were clawing at my heart in a frenzied attempt to suppress ideas about what smell the cleaners had been ridding the space of. It was eerie. His hats and jackets hung without a warm body to land on. A pile of clothes on his bed, ready to be fallen into. The baby blue, short sleeved button up my mom bought him… it had brought out his eyes the way rays of light peeking through the clouds accentuate the spaces they land atop the ocean. At that moment, I knew that this was not how I wanted to remember the space, to see it as his abandoned life. I did not want to see it as what he left behind.
I so badly wanted to think of that space in the way I thought of our old apartment together — to see us there, to see the moments. The minuscule flashes of a memory so precise that I can smell the air in the room. I’m not sure why I stepped into that space one last time. I had been asked and I suppose I didn’t know how to decline and that I should. Maybe I would have forever regretted not going back. I won’t know, of course, and it doesn’t really matter. Though, I do know that I regret saying yes to something else that day.
Did I want to see where — where he took his life?
My mind exclaimed no as “yes” left my lips.
After one brief moment of gliding my fingers over a hole in a door frame, my memory altered how I envisioned that space. For a long while, my dreams recalled it as if I had been there, as if I had walked in to find him after. Those dreams were vivid, from his hair to his shoes. They were dramatic and traumatic; at that point in time I was struck with daily panic attacks. It was confusing — a fabricated memory, my subconscious seemingly nagging at me with what I never actually saw.
Then, I had another dream of him. This one was in a white, heavenly place — a place that doesn’t exist in life as I know it. A moment that never happened, words never actually exchanged. Life after death. In that dream, I asked him why, why he left. I found closure and healing in that fictitious moment. It’s like when I see a picture of him I haven’t seen before. There is beauty in that, for on the other side of the moment of grief where I feel as though I am losing him all over again, there is a moment of discovery. A combination of angle and environment and outfit and lighting and posture that appears. A familiar shirt and hat, in an unfamiliar space, a unique shadow below his cheekbone and the way light hits his hair. Like being given the gift of a new memory of him to store. For a moment, in seeing him anew, he is brought back to life.
I had to bring his apartment back to life in my mind. I worked exceedingly hard to no longer envision how he left when I thought of him or recalled the spaces we occupied. Who and what filled those spaces are what’s precious. I hold tremendous space for the love, time, and moments I am so fortunate to have had with him. I hold space for Andy.
–
I will remember you
When your eyes met mine
For the final time
And you said you’d always love me
–
When I’m an old woman
I will remember you, and think of how you’d be
I will hold space for you
In the chair next to me
–
I cannot remember you, seldomly
Since you were taken from me
By the hands, of an anguished man
So, I will not remember you, seldomly
