You do not notice when it goes.
That is the hardest part to explain to people who have not been through it yet. You do not notice the moment the room stops smelling like her. You are not standing in the doorway one particular morning when it leaves. It goes slowly, the way almost everything goes slowly if you are paying attention and sometimes not paying attention is how you survive it. You go in for something, a sweater or a book, and one day you register that the room is just a room now, that it smells like a room, and something drops in you, something quiet and without a name that you would not describe to anyone because how do you explain that you are grieving a smell.
Her shampoo. The particular soap she used. The faint sweetness of a teenager’s room that has clothes on the floor and a candle she lit even though you told her not to and a collection of things that mattered to her in ways you mostly did not understand and tried anyway to understand because you knew that your not understanding was not about you and was not a failure.
I stood in the doorway of that room for twenty minutes once.
I did not go in. I just stood there and looked at the neutrality of it, the way it had become a guest room with a desk, the way her whole particular self had been packed into boxes and driven to an apartment three provinces away, and I thought: this is what I wanted. I raised her to go. I taught her that going was safe. I modelled going, I went myself, many times, for work, for study, for the particular kind of going that was really looking for yourself in a new place. I wanted her to know that she could go.
I did not expect it to feel like this when she did.
I am glad she went. I am glad she is three provinces away in an apartment that is accumulating its own smell, her smell now without the house smell underneath it, her life beginning in earnest without me in the room.
I am glad and I am standing in the doorway and both of those things are true at the same time and I am learning that this is what love looks like when it matures. When it becomes large enough to hold the going and the missing simultaneously without choosing between them.
