furniture

The room is vacant. All the heavy pieces of mismatched furniture that sat unmoved for years — now they reside in homes of strangers. Very slowly I emptied you out.

I can stretch my arms out and spin around seven, eight, nine times, without hitting a wall or a lamp. I don’t have to fumble through the dark, knocking my shins against the wooden coffee table. My flesh no longer shows the bruised evidence of those clumsy encounters.

At night I sit with my back against the wall, in the far corner. I stare across the emptiness. I’m at peace with the space. But there are spots on the carpet, in the exact shape of your furniture, where the light crept through the windows every morning and gradually burned your outline into my carpet. The floor is gray in the middle. The sun has bleached it pale. But the original shade remains, exactly where the couch and the loveseat and the bookshelf used to be.

I thought I got rid of everything. But your silhouette is left on the ground. Someday, I will put down hardwood.