To The Woman Who Loved Me
writing from the perspective of the houses we leave behind
I understand, I really do. And I’m happy for you.
I still see you when you’re out on long walks with your husband, with your dog, pushing a stroller with one baby and now a second. You seem content.
The neighbors told me that you moved into a townhouse down on Manchester Street—single family, colonial revival, cream with blue trim—and I know why you left me.
My one bedroom isn’t enough for a family. My chipped radiators aren’t safe for children. I’m too far away from your husband’s job. My aging bones rattled when you chased your dog around my hundred-year-old walls. Now that you’re a graduate and living on two incomes, you can afford to move into a better neighborhood.
But whenever you’re walking alone, you stand across the street and stare at me and I just want to call you home one last time. I want to pull you up the stairs and inside and back into my embrace. I want you to be mine again. I want your bare feet on my wooden floors and I want your hands on my door knobs and I want your gentle breath to rise and fall in my living room.
Do you remember how I let the southern sunlight in and drenched your bedroom in golden light, even during the coldest days of winter? Do you remember how everything within me blossomed, how your plants grew like crazy and no matter how many you gave away I was always a garden for you? I wonder if you remember how the whole world went silent in my shower, or the way my kitchen had just enough counter space, or the way my closet held all your clothes. Your rugs were the perfect dimensions for all my rooms and your picture frames looked just right on all my walls.
When you first met him, you started singing while you cooked and folded laundry. When you came home every night you just waltzed around smiling. And I wanted to be happy for you, but I was crushed. You stopped staying home to read or watch TV with me, and I felt like I barely even saw you anymore. You forgot to change my light bulbs and clean my windows and sweep my floors. Some nights you didn’t come home at all and I just sat here with the blinds still open, letting the street lights stare into my empty rooms.
He proposed right here on my front porch, and when I realized you were getting married I tried to be even better for you. I held my breath so my floorboards wouldn’t creak, I stayed awake all night to keep your bedroom the perfect temperature, I didn’t have a single mouse all winter. I let even more sunlight in. I thought I could convince you to stay.
But you packed up all your belongings and he helped you do it and despite my desperate pleas, you left me.
I’ll never forget how you stood in the doorway as you prepared to leave for the last time, your hand on my door frame and the silent tears rolling down your cheeks because you had never stopped loving me.
You were about to become someone who needed a different home—but in that moment you were still perched on the threshold between worlds, paused in the liminal space between two lives. When you left me you would be leaving behind a part of yourself that would forever and always be mine. And I wanted to tell you, it’s not too late. Bring back the furniture. Stay with me.
But your husband called to you from the truck, and you took a deep breath and wiped your tears and told him you would be right down. “Goodbye, house,” you whispered. “You were so, so good to me.”
“I love you,” you said as you started crying again.
You locked the door one last time.
And then you were gone.
A week later, the landlord shut off my water and electricity. I sat empty for six months, all my lights turned off, furniture gone, just crouching on this hill alone in my darkness. I thought you would be the one to love me forever. I thought I’d hold you for the rest of your life. In a hundred years of tenants, no one else’s life has ever fit within my walls as well as yours did. I think I was built for you.
Eventually some old man moved in. He respects me, I guess. He puts batteries in the smoke detectors and turns off the lights when he leaves a room. But I smell like fish and cigarettes and I’m sweaty with his old man stink. I don’t know what he does, but he’s never home before sundown so he can’t adore the way I glow with the afternoon light. Heck, he doesn’t even open the blinds. Every night he eats his boiled fish in the harsh white glare of his awful fluorescent lamps, and I hate him more than I hated being alone.
My love, I know I wasn’t enough for you. You needed a house who offered you something I never could. But I want you to know that the happiest days of my life were the ones I spent loving you. I’ll never hold anyone else the way I held you. Through fire and through flood, I’ll never stop loving you.
I know you had to grow up, had to move on, had to move out. But I’ll always be here for you.
Love,
36 Lantern Street