I have a desk in my basement. So what? That doesn’t sound like it would be very interesting. My guess is that I’m not the only person that has a desk in her basement. I am rather curious to realize though, that I’ve had this desk in my basement for over ten years and I’ve never sat at it once. Why is that I wonder? It’s a perfectly functional desk. It’s one of those with a storage caddy above the desk surface, complete with its own lighting. I wonder if that bright florescent lighting was built in to hide its oppressiveness. This desk is positively massive! It stands six feet tall, with that atrocious storage caddy. I feel diminished next to it. Truly this thing isn’t just in the basement, it owns the basement. So now…why? So why do I have this desk lurking in my basement? And the bigger issue that I’m dancing around, is that I hate this desk. That’s pretty interesting, because I didn’t even realize until just now that I hated it. But I do! So why? Why am I keeping this desk? What is so important about this desk that it reigns supreme in my basement? Why can’t I just let it go?
I think possession tell stories. They are physical representations of places we’ve been, things we’ve done, and often who we were and who we were hoping to become. I believe a person’s possessions are a reflection of the person. There’s a problem with reflections though, they can be so easily distorted, like in a fun house mirror. Traveling through a fun house, the reflections I see may belong to me, but they certainly aren’t an accurate depiction of who I really am.
I moved the desk and the rest of my possessions into my house ten years ago due to my divorce. My soon to-be-ex-husband took a few pieces of furniture we shared and then related to me that the rest of our possessions were “my problem.” Some of those things had belonged to him – like the desk. Honestly, I can’t say the desk is my ex-husband’s possession, because it hasn’t been in his possession in over ten years. If the story is just that I don’t like the desk, I think I would have just had the movers take the thing into the alley to be picked up on garbage day. Instead, I felt obligated to move the desk into my house to take over my basement. This desk I hate, it does now belong to me. So it is a reflection of me then, not of my ex-husband. What is so important about this desk? What is it reflecting about me?
I don’t think that any divorce is pleasant, and mine was certainly no exception. The end of my marriage began one night when I went to the desk (yes the same desk now lurking in my basement) to work on the computer. I tapped the mouse to wake it up. Usually, it reset to the profile screen, where my husband and I had private passwords to separate our individual files. However, this time the computer opened to my husband’s open email.
What greeted me were several pictures of a girl in her twenties. She was dressed in her underwear and a button down blouse. Her pale hands with their dark nails were suggestively tugging at the buttons presenting glimpses of her nubile décolletage. Her mouth was open, her tongue playing on her sultry come-hither lips. I knew her. My husband had met her at work, she was hoping to be a professional singer and my husband had played me a song from her website. The list of emails between them exceeded what was visible on the open email view screen. I felt cold. I couldn’t move. My vision blurred as tears fell onto the keyboard. My husband was having an affair. After screaming viciously at him, he went to spend the night…elsewhere. I regretted my behavior and the terrible things I said. I wanted him to come back. We had just had a baby and we had just bought a house. I thought I tried to be understanding but I was served divorce papers instead.
I hate that desk but the oppression I feel from it didn’t come from its hulking size; that desk told a story from my divorce. The desk was a physical representation of the past. It was a like a fading picture of the very moment when I bought my first house with my handsome husband and my beautiful baby. The desk was a reflection of the time when I imagined myself as a loving wife and doting mother. And then all that was ripped in half when the desk revealed a beautiful girl I knew, in her underwear and button down shirt. I tried to bury the story in the basement, but my subconscious kept whispering, “It’s your problem.”
I made the divorce entirely my problem…just like that massive desk. I blamed myself for the divorce. I was convinced that I had over reacted - it was just some suggestive pictures after all. I should not have lost control. I should not have screamed at my husband. My thoughts continued the spiral of blame. Maybe if I had been more outgoing my husband would not have needed to seek out the company of a pretty young girl. Maybe if I was a better singer myself… maybe if I had been a better lover…maybe if I had been more attentive to my husband’s needs I could have saved my marriage. The more and more “maybes” I came up with the more and more distorted the story the desk told became.
The truth is, I had forgotten the emails and the pictures completely. My mind had danced around that truth until just now, because all I could see of myself in that desk was a shrew who had given her husband no other option but to divorce her. I don’t want to make myself out to be entirely innocent (or worse still – a victim), however, looking at my reflection cast from this desk, I really must acknowledge now that I’m looking at one of those fun house mirrors. Yes, that is me in that story. Yes there is perhaps some truth in all of my “maybes.” But to say the divorce was entirely “my problem” is a huge distortion of reality.
I wanted to know why I kept the desk these ten years. I think I wanted to hold on to an image of myself as a loving wife; but because I no longer had a husband, I kept the desk instead – as a perverse reminder of why I was not the loving wife I so wanted to be. It wasn’t the desk I couldn’t let go of, it was that lost image of myself. I think that’s why so many possessions are so hard to discard; we don’t want to lose who we once were. Unfortunately, in my case, this perverse reminder of who I wanted to be is holding me back from who I might become.
So…what about that desk in my basement? Are you in the market for a six foot desk with lighting and a storage caddy?
