Pain

I watch The Whale while giving my boyfriend a massage. Earlier today I used a shovel to scrape a dead mouse out of the trashcan. I live on the other side of the city, but I often visit on the weekends and do things like this. I like to be useful, and my boyfriend is severely depressed. 

My boyfriend doesn’t live in an ordinary house. He lives in a half-finished house, the kind that’s perpetually in need of renovations and crowded with belongings, belongings, belongings. The living room reminds me of a cathedral because it has a tall ceiling and old-fashioned triangular windows that let in big gulps of light. The windows are on the side of the house where the sun rises, too, which means sometimes the cathedral glows orange. 

Every shadow is terrifying. There’s an old leaf blower. Buckets of drywall. Stacks of trash and cardboard boxes and objects that, in my mind, become unique, yet-to-be-invented objects that take up too much space and can’t be named yet. You have to slip from one side of the room to the other carefully, like a snake. There’s a narrow path my boyfriend carved out when he was feeling optimistic. But the shadows are like monsters. All fang, no body. I don’t know why I’m always afraid to admit I’m afraid but I’ll say it: the house and its cathedral terrify me. 

I lift my phone flashlight as if it’s a crucifix. I navigate my way to a bathroom that has no door. The floor has a thin film of sawdust no matter how many times you vacuum, and the shower is just a tub with big sheets of plastic wrapped around it. There are back bedrooms, too. Equally spooky and unpainted. My boyfriend stacked two mattresses and a box spring on top of one another because he’s like the princess and the pea, feels every crumb. So the one bedroom is like a cartoon set for his too-tall bed. Laying there I can reach my fingers up and brush the ceiling.  

He hangs towels over all the back windows so he can sleep in later. His gaming computer sits on a crooked desk and glows at you if you pass through the doorway wrong. That damn computer is like a sore tooth. I stare at the wires longingly, wishing I could pull them out. But what good would that do? They’d just grow back, again and again and again.  

From the bathroom I navigate my way to the kitchen, which is on the other side of the cathedral. This is where the parakeets live, and it also has the only sink in the house. Feathers and seeds stick to the soles of my feet so I lift my ankles one at a time, scratch at the debris with my toes while I wash my hands. Stolen spoons from Olive Garden in the sink basin. Dried out mango seeds and succulents all along the windowsill. There’s a mesh screen between me and the window glass so my view of the backyard is never clear or accurate. I just see the shapes of trees coming out of long, long grass and overgrown dog fennel. 

The parakeets love the sound of the water running. They’re allowed to come out of their cages whenever they want, but they typically crowd in the smaller cage, two blue bodies and one yellow pressed against the white metal bars like they’re playing prison. I like to believe they’re happy, though. There was another yellow one only he had a heart attack and died. It was so unexpected that I laughed. I wasn’t there to see the body, and it was like my heart couldn’t let me do anything but laugh. They used to be my sister’s birds. They made her asthma act up, so somehow they came to live with my boyfriend. He feeds them well and cleans their water more often than they deserve. 

I look at them and can’t feel much of anything, even with them screaming and chirping at the sound of the water. It’s like all the noise they make bounces off of the walls and reminds me that this kitchen feels like a nightmare that the rest of the house grew out of. 

Years ago, when there were no walls, just boards and beams, we slept in this kitchen. The little IKEA cot is still here, only now it’s a sort of sofa that everything we don’t have time for gets dumped on. Clean plates. Dirty plates. Phone chargers. Bags of chips. I feel immensely guilty for not cleaning it, but where would I put everything? The kitchen counters are full, too. Glass jars. A coffee grinder. Cigarillos and abandoned yogurt containers. 

Years ago, the rest of the house was empty. You could almost hear the wind moving through it, a quiet moan, and it didn’t seem possible that all of the clutter of the kitchen could expand and devour. It also didn’t seem possible that progress would halt, leaving the house in a strange purgatory you couldn’t really invite anyone into. Although, my boyfriend did invite people over. I always felt myself covering my heart with shame when he did this. There was nowhere for anyone to sit, unless you went out onto the porch and sat on the sagging office chair. I would go to the fridge in the garage and pull out waters, diet Pepsi, anything to pass around. I know it shouldn’t have bothered me, the house being a mess, but it did. It still does. 

The porch is a graveyard of old soda cans and broken hoses and buckets full of ash. Once upon a time my boyfriend tried to burn down a section of the woods that’s part of his property, and the fire scalded everything in a perfect, hell-ish ring. He gathered the ash, said he’d use it to make soap. Now the rain etches away at it, and little seedlings come up out of the blackness. When visitors come I stare down into those buckets and sip my diet Pepsi slowly, hoping the carbonation will burn through my esophagus and make me forget how strange and shameful I feel. 

Before I return to my boyfriend, who isn’t paying attention to The Whale with me but is intently tapping away at a space travel game on his phone, I pour myself a drink. Moscato mixed with hard seltzer. Ice. My other drink of choice when I’m here. I like the veil it creates. I can be in my skin but outside of it, watching in a comfortable, humid haze. A fist-like knot twists in my stomach when I take the first sip. I never used to drink much. Even when I was in college. 

“Oh, did you want me to pause it?” my boyfriend rotates so he can see me approaching in the dark. The movie is playing on my tiny laptop screen, propped on a sunken pillow. I hand my glass to him before he can even ask. He takes a long drink and I am reminded again that he has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. On screen, the actors are yelling at one another. 

“It’s okay. Just rewind for like ten minutes,” I smile. I place my glass in a corner where I think neither of us are likely to kick it over. I’m short, so I have to heave myself up onto the bed. 

In addition to being depressed, my boyfriend also has fibromyalgia. He describes the pain to me like fish hooks pulling the muscles in different directions. He says he wakes up in the morning and feels like he just ran a marathon. I press my elbows into his shoulder blades and rub down his back and calves. I can feel the pain breaking up, like gravel loosed from a cliffside, and yet I can’t chase it all the way out of him. Neither one of us knows how to do that.