"S P A C E" by Tsahai Makeda
The bedroom closet does not have enough space to hold all of our clothes--mine and his. I have more than he does, so my stuff sometimes winds up on his side of the rack. He does not like that. He forcefully pushes my things to my side, though there isn’t room for them to fit. I try to use hangers to make it easier to share, you know, the thin velvet ones. He buys the plastic ones that are thicker than his clothes.
Before, I slept on the edge of our queen-sized bed. He slept as if he were still on a full-sized mattress in his Jamaica Estates apartment--alone. I wasn’t upset when he stopped coming to bed at night. It’s five years now and he hasn’t come back. He made the basement his bedroom. He says he has more space. So does our marriage.
When he bought this house, we already had three kids. I had a son and a daughter from my first marriage, then I had our son. We both lived in New York City and knew that the urban landscape was not the place we wanted to raise our children--both mine and ours. We wanted space. My priority was inside the house and his was outside. He won. We moved one hundred miles away from New York City. He commuted, I worked from home so we wouldn’t need daycare. The house was small. Two bedrooms for five people. “We’ll make the attic a bedroom,” he said. And we did. Then I got pregnant again and started to worry about space. But it didn’t matter because I miscarried that baby. I tied my tubes. My womb, now an empty space.
Then the space between us got bigger. The first time I noticed he’d been detaching, I saw an opened tube of toothpaste in the first floor bathroom. Initially, I hadn’t thought much of it, but soon I realized that he had removed some of his belongings from the medicine cabinet in the full bathroom upstairs and placed them in the medicine cabinet in the half bathroom downstairs. There are five of us that occupy the main bathroom. I figured that maybe he wanted a little more privacy… for his things, but what he wanted was his own space in a home that requires him to share. He doesn’t share. That was just the beginning. Meticulously, he removed all his things from the master bedroom, my bedroom, and moved them to various locations about the house. He’s been carving out his own space right in between the one we had created together.
There is a gaping and monstrous hole in our front yard. It is horrendous. It’s the size of a small inground swimming pool but all that resides there are worms and the lone turtle who often finds himself trapped because rain water has filled it up slightly. He says it’s for a pond. It’s a nice idea. If he ever does it. He won’t do it. That hole is going to stay a hole and the only water that’ll ever bless it will be the one the Lord sends from the sky. I hate that hole in the ground.
I am a writer. I own more books than I can count and I am always bringing new ones home. But there is no space. He moved out of the bedroom and into the basement because he said he didn’t have any space to be himself in the space that was supposed to be for us. The basement was the family’s and also where my books lived. Now he’s made it his bedroom and my books may have to find somewhere else. None of my things can ever occupy any space long enough to belong. He hates them, my books. He doesn’t see the point in having so many, especially ones that I’ve already read. “After you read ‘em, throw ‘em out. What are you keeping them for, it’s just hoarding at this point.” He says it with malice. He would burn them if he knew I wouldn’t serve retribution. I would have no problems throwing all of his belongings in his car and setting it on fire. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about space. I’ve lived in this house for over twenty years and I don’t feel it’s mine.
He has occupied a space in my mind that he should not have. If we had given each other space in our hearts, then we wouldn’t be fighting for space in each other’s life. It’s too late now, so I find myself wanting to leave my home, in search of new space.
Tsahai Makeda is a writer and educator who teaches in the Bronx, NY. She earned her BA in English from SUNY New Paltz and her MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work appears in Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Epiphany, Breadcrumbs, and REWRITE London. She lives at the foot of the Catskills with her husband and two of her four young humans where she is currently working on her debut novel.
