Something was to arrive at the apartment between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m., but he wouldn’t tell her what it was. He’d just tell her when it was arriving.

Already look who was the boss of everything.

His stuff was in her (their) apartment.
Crazynutso. Right then, he was in her—their—room unpacking his things, while she was busying herself thinking about what not to think about.

She was nervous but fine, and still—she had to panic, at least a little. Foremost about his stuff being in their apartment. All those books and papers. The globes. That decrepit old office chair. The maps in cheap frames. And also that huge barn table she’d been coveting, its beautiful, dark, sturdy wood and its eclectic wooden chairs. There was certainly an assortment of things.

She needed to panic. Then she needed to worry about this delivery, what it was, and how he was apparently bossing everything already; it’d been only two hours since he’d begun moving in. What would happen to her space? To her?

She ought to spend more time worrying about how often and how much she needed to control everything, rather than what she worried about. She knew how generally pointless this worry was.

She worried too much about who was the boss of what. But she was concerned she’d wake up one day to find herself some kind of puppet. Left to wonder who she’d become, exactly, now that she finally saw all the strings.

How did it happen? she’d wonder then. How was it possible she hadn’t noticed before? And now … how would she untangle herself? So unpracticed. Her sense of herself atrophied from disuse. She wasn’t at all in love with herself, but she was afraid of losing her footing just the same.

…

Now, in Brooklyn with Mark, she worried too much about who was the boss of what. It would be better not to think this way, she knew.

So, instead, at that moment, she was trying very consciously to stop ruminating about all this; to focus on Mark moving in —  on not ruining it all by obsessing about a million things that weren’t actually happening— things that were certainly not the important things.

Important things like how fortunate it was that she finally found him, and he, her. She should focus on being a little grateful that they found one another. That they would now come home to the same apartment. This would be their first summer in Brooklyn, living together, in their home.

When 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. finally arrived, he was busily unpacking, and she was wandering around exhausted from her own worry, from worrying about worrying. The buzzer rang. She ran down the two flights of stairs, swung open the door, and signed. In a box addressed directly to her, from the local flower shop: a colorful bouquet of flowers.

A note addressing her said:

Here’s the end of The Hostel at 224.

all my love.

-M