The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Familiar by Sarah Kain Gutowski

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A Little Push

My extraordinary self turned out to be less extraordinary
than we’d anticipated. She wasn’t even good at packing up
her things: she kept removing, then replacing, her tap shoes

and favorite sequined gowns—glitter escaping cellophane
to coat her fingers, the bedspread, all surfaces inside
and beyond her suitcase. Now we find reminders of her

everywhere. My ordinary self lifts the shades in the morning
and frowns—sunlight refracts off tiny squares adhered
to the nightstand, the hamper’s wicker rings. This will take

hours and days to remove. Her personal items sit tossed
in a corner, what we found after she’d left: wads of foreign
paper currency; a camera leaking acrid batteries;

the loose ephemera of a brief photography career.
She left not in a rush but in a cloud of disarray and tears,
the melodrama that marked her too overwrought

for the stage. She didn’t want to stay but didn’t want
to go, didn’t want to make the decision to separate.
My ordinary self gave her a little push: nothing too

vicious, just pressure along the shoulders that said: This
is your direction. It was the tree leaves grinding like teeth
that whispered: It won’t do any good to look back.

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