Marissa Landrigan, What I Lost in the Breakup(s) | L*STS

      

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What I Lost in the Breakup(s)

Marissa Landrigan

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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• The red Cursive t-shirt with the “Driftwood: A Fairytale” design, which he’d bought for me the week before at the show. When I told him I didn’t see this going any further he said fine, then, give me back the t-shirt. Women’s XS;
• At least two—possibly three—Claddagh rings;
• Access to the washer and dryer in his apartment building;
• The version of me who thought she’d marry the boy she fell in love with when she was 18. The ability to believe in something so simple;
• The kind of self-confidence you can only have before being dumped by someone you were planning to dump;
• The antique steamer trunk painted red and chipped, and the gorgeous mint green corner book cabinet with streaks of pink showing through where the DIY paint job (not his) got sloppy. His parents had bought them for us at his favorite antique store in Bozeman, then we’d moved both pieces from there to New York and then to Iowa; they were rightfully his, and I felt too guilty for making him drive back to Iowa from his summer job counting blue-winged warblers in ___ State Forest just to pack his stuff out of what was now just my apartment. I made it happen, but I was still sad to see them go; 
• All his field guides, and the names of things inside them; 
• The bright orange and literally threadbare Reese’s t-shirt which was my favorite to sleep in;
• Foo Fighters Greatest Hits on CD, which he insisted was his when I came to get the (very small) handful of my things I’d kept at his apartment (really, such a small number of things after every night there for nearly two years). It wasn’t his—he’d been with me when I bought it—but I didn’t care enough about the CD to fight for it. I’d fight for him to take me back for another year, and lose much more from that;
• Omaha, a whole city I loved and thought I’d make a home in—the used bookstore with stacks piled in every aisle and corner, threatening to topple; the brunch burritos; his mother’s house, his childhood friends;
• One of my best friends;
• One of my best readers;
• Salmon, and ratatouille, and beef bourgignon, and the handful of other things I’ve not yet bothered to learn to cook for myself;
• The ability to listen without crying to “Weird Goodbyes” by The National feat. Bon Iver, or “You Made it Feel Like Home” by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross;
• Most of the decent furniture I’d acquired in my adult life: the grey West Elm couch my parents bought us; the bed frame and dresser I spent my tax return on; the dining room set we financed when we started hosting our own Thanksgiving dinner and needed more seats at the table. I left all these willingly in what I knew would still be my daughter’s house—still her furniture, still her Thanksgiving table; 
• Yes, the house, too: my first house—our first house, that we named House Finch weeks after moving in, when a little yellow bird landed on the fence one May morning while we sat outside drinking coffee;
• The rusty old metal shed we’d together painted green and blue before even closing on the sale, the shed we’d agreed to convert into a studio for me when the time came for us to turn the office into a nursery for the baby. We’d never actually converted the shed—the project was clearly too complex and expensive an undertaking, the baby came sooner than we’d expected, we didn’t have the money or the time so I just wrote at the dining room table instead;
• Nights spent with friends out in the big hilly backyard, around the firepit, grilling and drinking beer and debating the relative merits of the various installments of the Fast & Furious franchise;
• Some as-yet-uncounted number of these friends, especially those in couples or those who were single men, most of whom had known him for a decade longer than they knew me;
• The handwritten recipe cards from his grandmother, for her corn salad, her seven-layer cookies, her beef with potatoes and green beans. The tiny recipe book his mother gave me as a wedding gift, which her mother and friends had filled as a gift for her bridal shower decades earlier. Of course. Of course these were his. They were family heirlooms from his family, which was no longer my family. They should live with him, his mother, his sister. But the loss of that lineage of women. The artifacts of belonging. The only remaining tangible connection I had to his grandmother, gone now, who also bore my daughter’s name;
• The only photographs that exist of me in labor, which live on his phone, in his Cloud. I could ask for them. I might someday. But it’s not only the photographs, which I don’t even like because of course, labor photos are not (meant to be) flattering, but—the memory of the most important day of my life, which lives in the mind of only just this one other person. The only other person who was there when they cut her from me, the only other person who loves her in the precise way that I do, the only other person who saw me become her mother. My primary witness, the shared keeper of these memories;
• My emergency contact;
• A shared history that becomes like an amnesia—not gone, exactly, but once-removed. An echo remains but it is not the thing itself. Someday soon I will bury the tattoo of his initial under another image, but the tattoo won’t ever be gone, just inked over. And no one else but him and me will ever remember what was once there. 

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I make lists constantly; I organize my life around them. To-do lists, grocery lists, reading lists. I am always chasing the dopamine hit of crossing an item off a list, of having accomplished something. But I've also long-since been preoccupied with the idea of being or getting lost, of losing things, people, places -- maybe as a kind of incantation against loss. Recently, the structure of my life has changed dramatically, and my meditations on loss became real and heavy in a way I hadn't previously contended with, so I thought I'd try to make a list to navigate this: a list where everything has already been crossed off but nothing has been accomplished. A list of absences, abandonments. A list of what is not there anymore, whether I like it or not. 

Marissa Landrigan's essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications including Orion, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Diagram, and elsewhere. Her first book, a food memoir titled The Vegetarian's Guide to Eating Meat, was published by Greystone Booksin 2017, and she is currently at work on a second manuscript on motherhood and animal migrations. She is an Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Pittsburgh - Johnstown, where she also chairs the program in Multimedia and Digital Culture. She lives in Pittsburgh with her daughter, and will always happily talk to you about bats.