for the ex, part deux.
One last post from the “ex” series.
My husband was not someone who would ever claim to have read Tolstoy or Proust for pleasure. When his mind needed a book, he went to Asimov or Bradbury, or Gaiman and the occasional Moore. He read Wired rather then The Economist. He played World of Warcraft in his spare time. He was on Linux before he was on Windows.
He was different from the other men I had dated. He was practical. Quiet, but not with the smoldering, simmering intensity I had come to expect from silence. Staunch, but with a firmness unlaced with arrogance. Instead, he was shy in a matter of fact way, because to him it was the path of least resistance. He took everything in stride, was seldom ever flustered.
At first, I didn’t know how to handle his stoicism, his almost stubborn lack of drama. Now I recognize how similar we actually were. Together, we inhabited a space that had been cleared of the debris of previous entanglements, emptied of the chaos of past emotions.
That isn’t to say that we kept secrets, because we never did. There was no cause. Instead, we held the various pains and sufferings up to the light, displayed in stark, naked glory, each put in its place. Deprived of mystery or shadow, drama never seemed able to gain a foothold. There was too much objectivity, too much plain logic. He was just that kind of man.
I used to imagine that this clean, open-minded pragmatism was the cornerstone of our equilibrium.
I used to imagine that this equilibrium anchored me.
One afternoon, in our flat in Forest Hills, he came home with a bulging duffel bag slung over a shoulder, his delicate, long-fingered hands clutching a much battered cardboard box. He poured the contents into the carpet of our bedroom floor: cables, wires, plastic and metal and copper things.
“You’re going to build a desktop,” he told me, smiling.
We did this on occasion. I would buy him a book that I thought he might like, which he would then read, but we knew it was only to please me. He would explain the inner workings of the virus mind, and I would listen and nod my head, but it was only to make him feel like he had taught me something, that our intertwined lives served some higher purpose.
That weekend, I sat on the floor and began the trying task of assembling a computer from various spare parts culled from office storage spaces and friends’ garages. He was meticulous, and I tried to be patient. We discussed the special uses of this new thing which we were to create. What kind of sound card would we need? What kind of video? How fast did it need to be? How much memory? What programs would it need to run? What OS? The project soon took a life of its own.
We modified everything that could be modified. We adapted a hybrid cooling system that integrated special fans and water-filled tubes. We tested different motherboards. We clipped and extended wires, wrapped and twisted copper into intricate braids, scoured the discards of even more geek-friends. He tested various open-source software. Our only rule? We would not spend a penny.
It took a few days, but when it was done, I felt like I had given birth to a child. There it was, an enormous desktop carved from scraps and refuse, assembled by my own hands. We gave it pride of place in our apartment. I used it everyday until we had to move.
We decided to move to Las Vegas.
I don’t remember the intricacies of that conversation. I don’t remember the paths that may have unwound in my mind. But I do remember telling myself that if nothing else, it would be different. Interesting. Another chance to push myself out of my ever-shifting comfort zone. Another piece of the world to see.
The day we were supposed to leave New York, we stared at the computer we had once built. It had been painted a riot of purples and blues and reds – my idea, a sort of brand to claim it as my own. The behemoth had now been unplugged and disconnected, stripped of any kind of function. It lay uselessly in the greenhouse, surrounded by the other discards of our lives.
“Let’s take it with us,” I said finally.
“I guess we could try,” he replied.
We hauled monitor, keyboard, and tower out to the garage. We had created this, I kept on telling myself. Each piece had been carefully selected from the rubble. Each bob and bit and copper wire inspected, cleaned, and modified. We had picked the colors. We had installed and adapted its programs. It was a repository of unbacked up code, of forgotten stories, of unfinished poems, of the beginnings of memory. In this thing – this lifeless heap of odds and ends, we had poured pieces of ourselves.
We lay the various parts on the sidewalk. I opened the door to his car.
The backseat was so full, I feared that moving even the tiniest thing would cause this tangible manifestation of our years together to collapse, like a house of cards. This was the puzzle of us, I thought. Books and speakers, pillows and paintings, geeky little figurines. Separate little things, piled up on top of each other haphazardly for no other reason than the fact that they had to be moved.
My life and his, unraveled to a puzzle in the back of a car.
And the desktop we built continued to lie dispassionately on the side of the street. It wouldn’t, couldn’t ever fit. So we simply left it on the curb.
Originally published on Tumblr, July 2010.