Throughout the streets of Madison, people were moving on. At the end of every July, leases turn over and the neighborhoods fill with worthy, gently loved things that, due to circumstances, must go. People walk up and down the streets during Hippie Christmas, this extended garage sale where no prices are haggled, but relationships are considered: Does anyone with a truck value you enough to drop everything and move this dove-wing powder-blue chaise for you? Is the downstairs neighbor a close enough friend to lug a dresser upstairs with you? Do you have it within yourself to scrape your shins and wrangle a bookcase three blocks to your apartment, claiming, definitively, that it is yours and only yours?
     The streets fill. Detritus blows away. Does anyone love you at all, even in passing?
     When J and I decided to live many states apart after the first year of the pandemic, I chose to get rid of a glass-topped end table I'd inherited a decade ago from my sister. On it, I placed a Coach purse she'd also given me that made me bristle. Next to it, Twyla Tharp's book. Two wilting plants—peperomias, potted—gone before I could look back to wish them goodbye. I was a wound purging. Everything needed to go.

*

"I never understood why you kept that end table," J said. "It's not you."
     "Every night, we set drinks on it. And bowls. We set things on it," I said, pantomiming. "That's why. It provided stability."
     The table was a wrought-iron monstrosity, a Victorian hangover with circlets the size of wrists dangling from the legs, and I was glad he thought it was nothing like me. Besides, who needs a table for food and drink and joy when J would be living a thousand miles away? That was how the thinking went.
     A storm passed over the street and we said nothing about it. Both of us were in our own worlds. I was packing boxes of books and he was dismantling a standing desk. Rain hit the windows with the force of hail. Lightning struck, glorious and elsewhere. When the lights went out, I began to think: This was a plot. Our need to live apart was the pre-existing condition from which plot springs, and this darkness was perturbation. Everything was getting in the way. We couldn't see a path forward. While my partner took to the streets to ask the neighbors if they had electricity, to verify it was not a personal curse, I wondered what the story's arc might be. We were a couple in need of a climax.

*

A balm to heal all things, that's why we moved to Madison: no more multi-hour commutes, basement apartments, poverty. We were going to live steady, in the same city, and stop flinging ourselves across the country for better opportunities. But we couldn't stand to live steady, not together, not for at least a year and at least not during a pandemic, and so he was moving across the country and I was moving down the street.
     The neighborhood was made of Nordic geniuses: high-cheekboned humans so singularly intelligent, going about their revolutionary scholarship with practicality and patience, unwinding from the day by considering which twig to clip from their rosebush while drinking a local IPA, chatting on the porch about which mulch would prevent root rot. The violins in the gazebo, the yogis practicing beside them, the retirees sipping wine on the park bench while they completed the crossword in The Times. Couples biked around the lake and talked about the books they'd written. People rode unicycles to work while sipping coffee. When my car battery died in the middle of the night, a neighbor appeared and gave me a jump with his Jeep without my needing to ask. They were there for one another. That was not a question. It was not the drama of their lives. They worried about the weather for the cookout, and if their Fulbright travel would interrupt the ancestral healing being led by the shaman down the block. As a somewhat tall and blonde person who walks with some speed, some purpose, some disregard for fashion and hygiene, I could pass for one of them. But I knew I was not like them. I was broken, alone, scraping by. And Bohemian—from a country that had ceased to exist for so long that people often tried to act like it never was. "Czech," they'd say. Or, "A free spirit!"

*

I called it The Womb, initially for its size—a small studio contracting around me. Then for the sensation of starting over, starting from next to nothing. Then, I began to hope it might be a fertile spot—that I would write my way out.
     I was a C-section. My mother says I didn't want to be born.
     Three crows greeted me on my first morning alone. They stood in a row in the neighbor's driveway and began to squawk and beat their shining wings as soon as I exited with the dog.
     Did I forget to mention the dog?
     I loved the dog, but my initial impulse to keep her instead of sending her off with J was that of a gambler holding onto her last chip.
     It took six months of living in The Womb to consider the dog anything other than a hostage. The dog and I lived in The Womb, and tried to ferment. We tried to find the deep other selves that life and its pains had kept from us. We considered herbs. We slept, her on a little green chair beside my bed, and we ate venison that J had hunted and provided for us. I worked two jobs, and when caught in traffic would watch the dog at home through my phone, inscribing her circle from the chair to her water bowl to the refrigerator and back to her chair, trapped—shaking and shedding just for the exercise. We listened to books about wild women in the desert, women as wolves, women earning a late-in-life living from the stage. I held the dog's white paw and asked her about her youth, the days before she was rescued. We watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Whenever the upstairs neighbors triggered the smoke alarm, or a stranger pounded on the door, the dog wagged her tail and let me know that wherever I went, she went.

*

A week into living at The Womb, a narrow bookcase appeared beside the sidewalk. A sorry-looking thing that fell apart if you touched it the wrong way. It just fit under The Womb's window, and held plants and notebooks and made life feel livable for the first time in a long time.

*

In October, December, February, there were stained mattresses, broken desks, duct-taped computer chairs that appeared on the curb and stayed for months of snow and rain, dog drizzle, spiders who built webs that extended from box springs and chair arms to the dead clover, the rotted zinnias, the little libraries, the garbage bins everyone deserted to blow around the streets over the holidays. Take them, I thought while walking with the dog as quickly as we could in the cold. Somebody, anybody—demolish them. Their time was over. Nobody wanted them.

*

J would visit. The interval: three weeks a thousand miles away and one long week with the dog and me in The Womb, jumping over carry-on luggage and eating takeout off wood crates. And over again. That little rage pot, my heart, churned, gestating something. I felt certain it would burst from excess heat or an abundance of pressure any moment. We couldn't find an end to things. We'd lost all sense of narrative.

*

In April, while walking along Lake Monona, the dog sniffed out a For Rent sign. I told her we couldn't afford The Lake House. I reminded her that life did not offer us that type of bounty. I had become a person who talked to her dog while walking her. But there were printouts in a tube beside the sign, and it seemed we couldn't afford The Lake House in the same way we couldn't afford The Womb. It was scrape-by-able. I saw the apartment twice and said no twice—no to the postage stamp kitchen, no to the sink stacked atop the toilet, but always yes to the extending lake, to the moon sparkling across it each night—before the landlord told me he was pretty sure I was the one who would rent the space. He had a feeling, and said he would hold off renting it to anyone until I said yes. At last, someone had claimed us.

*

The dog and I moved during peak Hippie Christmas. The streets were filled with wooden kitchen chairs tied together with rope and bundles of calla lilies. Down the block, there was a full set of weights with a bench. In the other direction, a kitchen cart with opened boxes of pasta and a sous vide with a notecard taped to it, Works great! Moving to Switzerland! Two church organs, side-by-side. There were racks for shoes and stands for hats. In the grass, many round serving platters—silver and gold—with costume jewelry arranged on them. A Hy-Vee box of women's shoes, All Sz 8 written on the side.
     J was there. I had picked him up from the airport the way I usually did: with the expectation that we would have a quick and understanding breakup in the parking lot, and I would be able to circle the car around so he could catch the next flight out. But he'd said, as usual, that he thought things were fine between us: a summary that did not fit my lived experience, the not-fine-ness of it all, but still I drove him to The Womb. He was there to help us move.
     The bookcase fell apart as he lifted it. "You want to keep this?" he asked. I did. Each item in The Womb was there because it sustained. I kept the bookcase. I kept a rocking chair made for my great-grandmother, the Bohemian matriarch of the family farmhouse, a woman I was named after but had never met. I kept a honeycomb quilt another great-grandmother had sewn from old bread bags and the unsalvageable dresses my mother and her sisters had worn. I imagined this woman, drinking tea eighty years ago and not knowing me, sewing because the thought of someone like me was buried in her, a seed in her story.
     J stayed away for the year I lived in The Womb. He stayed away the first year I lived in The Lake House.
     The dog received a diagnosis. She died. I received some diagnoses, and only some were right. Which meant I had finally learned the art of escape.
     J stayed away another year. But within that year my chest—my ribs, my breast bone—might as well have become transparent: the glass doors of a china cabinet. I could hide nothing. Everyone could see my story at a glance, or so I was sure. Everything inside this type of cabinet—so I'd heard was tradition—had an inherited value, had been bestowed. But my chest's shelves were cluttered with that rage-pot, a thing vaguely familiar to me, like a heart's hum, and broken bowls, shattered teacups, their handles seeking a hand. With each shifting of the cabinet, say, to move it down the stairs and onto the side of the street, the pieces sang an erratic tune somewhere between the wind through the chime and the waves landing on the beach, something between watching and waiting. And even though it would be easy enough to dump it all out, or to sift through and attempt salvage, I couldn't. I left it all as it was, eager to see who might wander by.

__

[One of the books mentioned obliquely in the essay, very formative for me and the dog.]