Christopher bigelow
personal effects
Your husband has been dead for less than a month, and your landlord already wants you gone. Your name may be on the lease, but your near non-existent credit history is a red flag for management. You have eight days, twelve hours, and fifty-four minutes to clear out.
You kept the place a perfect replica of the day he died for as long as you could. You tiptoed around, playing three-dimensional Minesweeper, afraid to disturb anything for fear you’d blow it up and he’d die all over again. Time is a vapor, and you forget the little things. You don’t remember brushing your teeth, but the bristles of your brush are wet. The phone rings. You answer but forget who it was and what was said as soon as the line disconnects. Gun to your head, you couldn’t say when last you ate or slept.
Each day, more of him disappears. His scent is the first to go, you notice as you bury your nose in pillowcases, couch cushions, and unwashed hoodies. You spend your days drifting from room to room, reducing his life into cardboard boxes. You label them matter-of-factly: “Playbills,” “pickleball equipment,” “shot glass collection.”
You pull coats out of the front closet, tossing those you might still wear in one pile and those you won’t in another. You always joked that the best part of being gay was wearing each other’s clothes. Your heart aches as you plunge your hands into the pockets, remembering the times you invaded them as the two of you walked side-by-side. Every gum wrapper, faded receipt, and coin is a holy relic to be honored. You were judged harshly for marrying an older man. You know that to become the sole conservator of his memory would annihilate you. You take secret vindication in tossing the hideous leather jacket he insisted on wearing half the year into the donation pile. In the deep pocket of a yellow windbreaker, you find a wad of stuff held together with a simple chrome money clip. On top is an AMC ticket stub for a weekday matinee of a film you never saw.
It’s the first time you’ve been alone in the apartment since he died. The quiet is pervasive and unsettling, but it’s better than the pitying vigilance of your father or the sneering judgment of your sister. They’d been underfoot for weeks, paranoid you’d off yourself to escape the grief. They had appeared, unsummoned with suitcases in hand, and you convinced yourself that having others around might be good. Could perhaps help you navigate the fog that had descended, causing you to leave ice cream you forgot buying out on the counter to melt or reduce frozen pizza to ash by leaving it in the oven for hours. Could perhaps make sure you didn’t get too comfortable relying on the companionship of ghosts.
You hear a noise, the thump of something falling to your bedroom floor. Your heart leaps into your throat as the two sides of your brain shout at one another, the corpus callosum an ill-prepared referee between the part of you that knows your husband is dead and the part of you incapable of accepting that. You slide the money clip back over the wad of tickets and toss it in the deal-with-this-later pile.
You have not returned to your bedroom since it happened, even as your back and neck ache from weeks of sleeping on the rock-hard futon your husband was convinced qualified your home office as a guest bedroom. Your stomach does somersaults in your gut like a dog warning his owners of an impending storm. The door is slightly ajar; your hand lurches as you reach for the knob and push too forcefully into the room. It takes no time at all to locate the source of the noise. The remote control for the bedroom television lay face down on the floor a few feet from the bed, half covered in damp towels and wadded-up fitted sheets that had toppled from the bed after being haphazardly stacked.
The last time you’d woken up in that bed had been next to a corpse. You’d beaten on his chest and pleaded with him to wake up. It is stripped bare now, but you want to retch. You struggle to catch your breath, the few oxygen atoms not yet consumed by your grief evading your feeble lungs.
You notice an unfamiliar box on your bedside table, the kind meant to make a gift card seem like less of an afterthought, but too small to hold much else. It slips through your shaking fingers and onto the floor where its contents splay out on impact. You fall to your knees to return them, disappointed in your carelessness in this museum of a home. It is a box of photos and post-it notes. Your husband’s handwriting is sharp, the indentation of each letter so deep it is almost a tear. The notes are fragments: books you’ve mentioned, places he wants to take you, which brand of hazelnut coffee creamer you prefer. The photos are all boys.
Your own face might as well have a stranger’s, smiling up from most of the photos. The men in the rest really are. Each boy exudes a youthful joie de vivre. Almost all of the images are dated, some as far back as the year you were born, some as recent as this year. Two pictures land partially beneath the bed. In one, you and your husband beam over bowls of pho at your favorite hole in the wall. You cannot recall this particular outing but take frequent comfort in many like it. The other, dated one day later, is the figure of a young man standing in your kitchen fully naked with eyes, lips, and hands in compromising positions, labeled only by his initials. Your gaze lingers for a moment, but you close the lid.
Christopher Bigelow is a trans writer, former teacher, and metadata manager living in Chicago. He writes about the intersections of queerness, trans identity, the public school system, the full range of human emotion, and sometimes outer space. He can be found on the usual socials @topheradastra and at christopherbigelow.substack.com.