Tomorrow Marks 18 Months

Hard to believe she's been gone that long. Harder, still, to believe that she last slept in our bed in February '09.

I've been moody this past week. But I've also been productive. Her closet is mostly empty, and now even has a few of my things in it (in addition to her 803,972 pairs of shoes). Her pictures and some of her nick-nacks have been removed from the bedroom.

Somehow it has been an amazing process to look through her things this week. I've tried to do it before, but always got lost in sentimentality within the first 10 minutes. This time, I'm good for about an hour, and things that never had any real significance at all are finally just empty objects. Brushes, decorative boxes, pictures of people I never met.

And because I've spent so much time in my bedroom this week, I noticed how empty it sounds without all those things in it. It's weird, but the sound-signature in the room changes ever so slightly when any item is removed. Spend 7 years in a room without changing anything, and then take something out. See if you don't notice the same thing. This has actually made it hard for me to navigate to the bathroom in the dark--I'd never realized how much I relied on the sound of the room for that.

But I don't regret it. It needed to be done. More needs to be done. I can't hang on to artifacts. As Trent Reznor reminded me the other day, they're "just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be."

And even crazier? I've found an inner peace in doing this cleaning. Sure, the room is bare right now, but somehow I feel like I'm finally laying Amanda to rest. Well, more so than I have before.