Heartbreak and VarageSale: 50% Off Everything
Navigating Heartache and Selling Off Belongings
In the weeks following our break up, I spent an enormous amount of time on VarageSale.
Lamps and end tables — work desks and wrought-iron full length mirrors. Everything was up for grabs on the app, even the toaster we made our Cinnamon Raisen bagels and the prized Ninja 12-cup coffee maker I’d hugged upon unboxing when we moved in.
“Everything must go,” I wrote on the descriptions. “We’re headed to the US.”
Only, of course, I was lying.
It would be solely the cat and I boarding the misery train back home. My ex would move in with his parents a few floors under us in our Montreal condo complex.
In the aftermath of our end, it was a relentless chore each time I opened that god forsaken virtual garage sale app to more bidders. Another added task I not-so-quietly resented in the laundry list of break up boxes we needed to check by our June 15 move out.
“You didn’t put anything on VarageSale while I was away?” I scoffed once I’d returned to our home — a whopping two months after we split and thousands of rental dollars into an apartment I hadn’t laid foot in in three (We broke up while abroad in Colombia). “Couldn’t manage to snap a picture of the plastic tree and upload it?”
“You never told me how much to price anything, you wouldn’t send the prices Linds,” he shot back in our living room on the day or two after I came back. “I emailed and texted you like 5x about it.”
He was right of course, I didn’t send the prices. When he’d texted for them early on, I’d instead flown to London in an impromptu attempt to escape reality and wander the Camden High streets aimlessly with coffee in hand. I wasn’t communicative with him; had barely communicated with anyone really since we broke up on that balcony in Medellin.
I resented him for it anyway.
How easy it must be, I mused, uploading more photos of our barely-used furniture to the app the next morning. To rely on everyone else to be a grown up for you.
It was easy to resent him or the laundry list of inequalities I felt our life was riddled with together. But if I’m honest, I resented myself more.
This situation being another example of my propensity for disappearing and disassociating around the bend when things feel unmanageable. Only to have it rise back to the surface in an even more unpleasant and urgent fashion.
I don’t know why I do it. I just do.
When something overwhelms or hurts past a certain threshold, I simply Don Quixote myself, both mentally and physically, deluding myself that my reality is for another day, another existence.
A weaponized tool I’ve utilized far too often, and no matter the therapy, I can’t seem to shake.
Well, well, well, if it wasn’t now the consequences of my own decision making, I thought then, up to my chin in barely used appliances and the VarageSale messages pouring in with requests for more photo angles or eye-boggling low bids.
I know we’re not meant to take someones 70% less offer as demeaning. Merely an attempt at negotiating.
But I found it offensive all the same. The whole process (and don’t even get me started on Facebook Marketplace). From taking multiple pictures of the same item to pricing said item at egregiously low prices just to make a sale, the entire ordeal felt like someone stabbing me in the heart with our ludicrously expensive Chef’s Knife, carving out “what’s the price of your failed life?”
A life that had barely begun before it imploded in glorious fashion.
It’s not that I really cared when Isa from Floor 4 nickled-and-dimed me for the pots and pans.
It’s that they were the pots and pans he cooked my breakfasts with in the mornings: scrambled eggs with the onion and pepper and cheese. As I handed her the set, I made a point to highlight which pan was suited for each meal.
I doubt she listened — in fact one could argue she probably thought I was a bit manic— but it’s just that I thought she might want to know.
Those pans had a life before you, I wanted to say, as she shoved them off to her wary, disinterested husband hovering in the doorway.
They made omelettes and ground turkey meatballs, for Christ’s sake.
Don’t you understand, I wanted to scream to no one in particular: it’s not that I cared about the $12 I reluctantly shaved off the decorative couch pillow set.
It’s that I had spent hours meticulously envisioning them on that black leather couch, and how my father - when he’d come to visit - would likely arrange them so he could lay and watch Sunday Night football comfortably with my ex.
Hours sitting on the computer at night while he played video games, burying my head in the sand in retrospect, envisioning our fully furnished house when it was finally complete.
The baby we’d hopefully have within the coming years. The proximity of his parents just a few floors below, and the mornings when his mother would knock on our entry door and peek her smiling face in: “hello,” she always rang out with her endearing Colombian accent.
I cherished his parents. I’d loved their warmth, his father’s broken English and my broken Spanish often colliding in laughably disjointed ways — yet he always had a genuine hug ready when I walked into the room.
The older I get, the more uncommon it seems to actually like your significant other’s family: so many drawn-out tales over wine with friends, recounting some cringe-worthy or appalling episode involving a sister-in-law or mother-in-law—a relentless critique of a family not your own.
I’ve been blessed and cursed to never feel that way.
Cursed only in the hollowness that ensues when a family you once immersed yourself in, day-to-day, is one you no longer know.
When I had finally arrived back in Montreal on that first day — after a 10-hour drive across the border with an exhausted, restless cat pacing in her carrier—he wasn’t there.
But the life we shared three months prior was fossilized, untouched by time. Unshaken by our parting.
It’s not that I expected the apartment to be in disarray; I knew he’d moved in with his parents shortly after, also escaping our newfound reality.
But, I guess I just didn’t expect it to still feel so much like … home.
When I let Smudge out of the carrier, she sprang without hesitation, her little primordial pouch swaying as she pitter-pattered to her favorite sleeping spot in the closet to disappear from me and curse her existence as the pet-daughter of a transient mother.
We were home.
Only, it wasn’t home.
Or it was, but only briefly.
The stage of a home, without the warmth.
On the fridge, a Save the Date for my brother’s wedding, which had already passed. And an invitation to his sister’s wedding, the reason we were back in Colombia to begin with.
I opened the junk drawer by the sink — staring down at the now-stale mini Starbursts we kept hidden there when craving a handful or two.
To my left, our coats hung perfectly aligned in the open entry closet, by color and season, because for some reason that had mattered to me once. And now, I didn’t know why.
You can color-code your whole fucking life, I mused. Alphabetize the spice rack—labels facing out—and still lose everything anyway.
I stood there, paralyzed in our open-plan, two-bedroom, two-bath, high ceiling apartment. I wanted to preserve my life as it was in that moment: to continue to sleep in our Cali King bed with the mint-green sheets and stare out at the downtown Montreal skyline.
I was just so tired. An overwhelming urge to text: “Let’s just do Thai tonight — that one place y’know? The one with the Dumplings.”
Watch a movie, legs intertwined on the leather couch in front of me —
Couldn’t we undo it? Couldn’t we figure it out?
In any other circumstance, I would’ve left. Walked right out and pushed the elevator ground floor over and over til the doors closed.
But I had nowhere to go. And behind the hot tears, still an apartment full of things to pawn to the highest bidder.
You can change your mind, but you can’t change your decision.
And when he walked in behind me, shortly after I arrived, he looked at me in a way that confirmed just that.
We’d signed the dotted line. We knew we were done.
It just that some days, I’m not grieving you, still. I’m just grieving my home.
I was so close —
We were right there, weren’t we?
And it slipped through our fingers like quicksand.
Now, I float out at sea, time stands in a duel —
And the VarageSale app notifies me every few days that somewhere out there, is a person who is still interested in the bed frame we gifted to your sister <3