Something Tangible

Baggage

The large, beat-up plastic bag was bursting with medicine she didn't need: antihistamines even though she didn't have allergies, cough drops from 1989 and anti-diarrhea pills that were only slightly less out of date. The hypochondriac in her had stuffed an entire medicine cabinet in a stretched-out baggie but hadn't packed anything tangible for a trip halfway around the world. Even after rummaging around in the bathroom for 30 minutes she still hadn't gotten around to the toiletries.

"Crap," Katarina muttered, frowning at the empty suitcase that mocked her. She had always picked out her own outfits for vacations, but it was her detail-oriented husband who neatly arranged them in the suitcase so that every sweater and sock fit like a jigsaw puzzle.

She was not very good at folding. Or laundry. Or cooking. Or cleaning up. Or being a wife for that matter.

A decade of marriage — and the luxury of a loving husband who spoiled her lazy — was a hard lesson in inadequacy. She had given him plenty in return for her lack of domesticity: wit, honesty, passion, partying, traveling and the beauty of growing into adulthood together. Katarina and Matt met young and were together a total of 16 years, most of them good — until suddenly they weren't, and there was no recovering from it.

They had endured their fair share of traumas — lost pregnancies, lost jobs, mounting debt and a litany of health problems. The string of bad luck would've tested any couple but not necessarily broken them. Yet adversity changed her, and not always for the better. Katarina begrudgingly accepted the changes, unlike her husband, who clung to a wife that only existed in his memory.

She always wondered what would possess couples who'd been together 30, 40, 50 years to get a divorce. Why bother at that point? But now Katarina came to the conclusion that dawns on anyone who's muddled through a failing relationship: It's better to be alone than with someone you once loved. The pain of a bad marriage is unrelenting. It hits you when you least expect it and weighs you down all the other times. It twists you into someone you're not.

"Starting over sucks," the petite, discombobulated blonde mumbled to herself. What an epiphany Katarina. Maybe you should get a job writing sympathy cards. At least then you'd have a job.

Her career — yet another part of her identity she lost. Katarina had managed a small but respectable newspaper that reported on world affairs and politics from D.C., working her way up the ladder since joining the family-owned company straight out of college. She got to call the shots, travel, go to lavish receptions and do one of the few things that made her proud of her accomplishments.

She also grew complacent in a fast-paced industry that was leaving print journalism behind. Before she knew it, her newspaper was going under — another casualty of the digital revolution — and her job prospects had stalled. Katarina found herself trying to decipher the HTML coding she once dismissed as irrelevant to her job and struggling to hop on the blogging bandwagon alongside 20-year-olds who had more energy and skills than she did.

She was 35, no husband, no kids, no money, no career, no tech savvy and apparently no clue how to pack a simple suitcase.

You're the life of the pity party Katarina but you may want to sober up and start by tackling the actual laundry.

A heap of dirty clothes sat next to the barren suitcase, like two accomplices conspiring against productivity. I wear the same yoga pants every day — where did this pile even come from? Whoever said it's the little things in life that make you happy sure as hell wasn't talking about laundry.

Katarina tried to view her fresh start, and the daily chores it entailed, as something liberating — a chance to prove to everyone that the woman who could barely boil water could live on her own. But at the moment, staring at the insurmountable mountain of clothes in front of her, independence felt like drudgery.

A ringing phone gave Cinderella just the excuse she needed to avoid her chores a bit longer.

"Hey Mary," she answered, excited to talk to the one mutual friend she'd kept during the separation. Everyone else had migrated to her more easygoing, less complicated husband.

"How's the packing?"

"Getting there," she lied. As in I'll get there before it's done. "How are you? I'm glad you called. You're the only who doesn't just text. I feel like I'm in high school again talking on the phone — a cell phone, not a landline, but still."

"I figured you needed a break from the packing." Is it still considered a break if you haven't started?

"Haven't started yet have you?" Her friend was always a keen observer.

"Nope. Times like these the selfish bitch in me rears her head and I miss being married."

"So that you still had a butler?" Mary interjected. She was afflicted with the same foot-in-mouth disease that ailed Katarina.

"So that I had still had my best friend," she corrected her, though Mary wasn't far off from the truth. "Besides," Katarina sighed, "he may have been the butler, but I was the basket case in the relationship. And in my defense we were best friends. He was a good man who tolerated me."

"Cut that blame crap. How many times has your psychiatrist told you to stop beating yourself up? You both had a shit ton of issues. I knew you both remember? I can be honest — you don't pay me," she quipped.

"I should. You listen more than my overpaid psychiatrist does."

"Well you're broke, so I'll take a rain check. Even unemployed, you still get to go to the United Arab Emirates — beeatch!"

"Correction — I get to fly to Paris on business class thanks to the UAE so they can promote an airline company. They fly me out in style to butter me up, I hear a bunch of bigwigs tell me how great their airline is, I write a puff piece about how great it is, and then I earn just enough to pay off about two days' worth of credit card debt from the money I spent while I was getting bribed."

"Still worth it and I'm still jealous. Quit your bitching."

"I am spoiled," Katarina conceded. "When they offered me the press trip my first thought was why they weren't flying me to Dubai instead of Paris, as if Paris was some horrible consolation prize. I guess that's where one of their branch offices is. Whatever — as long as I arrive on business class."

"You must really be desperate for some kind of perk if you're flying at all. I've seen you on a plane before. It's ugly. Business or coach — you're pathetic. I'm pretty sure 5-year-olds get root canals with more grace."

"Not pathetic, just nervous," Katarina laughed, downplaying her crippling phobia of flying. "And what happened to not beating me up? You're supposed to be my psychiatrist."

"You can't afford me. So as your friend, I'll tell you what a professional wouldn't: Get your ass into gear and start packing," Mary instructed, hanging up on her bemused friend.