The Room I Made for My Anger

How it begins

I bought the chair because it was cheap, not because it represented the woman I would become.

The seller helped carry it downstairs.

Halfway, he said it had belonged to his first marriage.

I nearly left it there.

Then the bus came, and I remembered I still needed somewhere to sit.

In the new room, anger arrived before the electricity account had changed to my name.

It stood by the window giving advice.

Move the photographs. Don't answer. Answer immediately. Buy better curtains. Make sure he knows how well you're doing.

I gave it the chair.

This was not surrender.

I wanted it out of the doorway.

Ruth came over with a screwdriver and no theory about what I needed.

We fixed the handle on the wardrobe.

It still stuck.

She said we could try again next week.

The phrase next week did more for me than anything about beginning again.

After she left, I made tea and put two cups on the counter out of habit.

I did not smash one.

I did not call keeping it hope.

I put it away.

There are evenings when affection walks through the room wearing the same coat as resentment.

I am learning not to demand that every visitor arrive with a label.

Anger keeps its chair.

It is not allowed to answer the phone.

It can tell me when something hurts.

It cannot decide that hurting is the only fact worth keeping.

On Sunday, sunlight reached the patch of floor the chair had covered.

I moved it six inches left.

Not forward. Not backward.

Left, because that was where the room had space.

For the first time, I sat down without asking what the arrangement said about my future.

The chair held.

That was enough work for one object to do.