A House Built Out of Stone

Part 12

It’s a Saturday when Louis grows absolutely tired of looking at his flat.

The sheets on the bed are the first to go. He washes them biweekly, takes them to the laundromat and watches the spin cycles with his book resting on his knees, but they still smell like smoke, is the thing. That faded smell of cigarettes and expensive cologne that Louis isn’t sure is actually there or just lingering at the fringes of his conscience, waiting to be let go.

So, the sheets are the first to leave.

He lets them fall in a heap on the floor, pooling around his bare feet. The comforter is next, balled up at the end of the bed. He’s only used one half of it in months, the thing mostly useless, so Louis drags that off too. It’s heavier than he realized, warm and soft and he hates it. Never wants to see it again, really.

The bed looks awfully big and awfully bare like this. Louis stares down at it. He can’t imagine two people ever filling up a bed this big, especially with their bodies all twined together and tangled up underneath the covers. He can’t imagine feeling good in this bed, feeling loved in a bed this size. It should have swallowed him up.

It did swallow him up.

He takes the pillowcases off too, because they hold the scent the tightest, the shampoo embedded in them and they cling to it, they do. Louis lets them fall to the floor and he stares down at a bare mattress and an old bedframe and a bed he hasn’t properly slept on in months.

The covers can go in the trash, he thinks.

He leaves the box under his bed untouched. The box full of photographs that Louis has no idea what to do with. He keeps it sealed up tight, like an album of sorts, a picture book with too little words to explain what everything means.

Louis leaves the box. Because it’s important. Because it can be filled up with other things too, eventually. Hopefully. Pictures that mix with his past and make him want to open the box again.

He picks his clothes up off the floor. There are an awful lot of hangers lined up empty in the closet, so Louis gives them something to hold up. Gives them jumpers and trousers and all his skinnies. He stacks his shoeboxes on the shelf, hangs his scarves and beanies on the hooks on the side. It looks like a proper closet when he’s done, a little out of breath and tired but satisfied. It looks like a proper closet of Louis’ things, almost entirely full.

The living room is next. The sun shines on all the dust, highlights how how empty Louis’ flat is, even with him and all his things still in it. He picks up the magazines that don’t belong to him that are scattered across the table. They are the old glamour issues whose covers aren’t very glossy anymore, whose thin, fragile spines are falling apart and bent.

Not as sturdy as a book, the magazines. They gather dust in Louis’ flat and they fall apart.

There are the cushions on the sofa. Louis drags them off. They’re huge and they take up too much space on the floor. But they’re gone from the sofa now, even if eventually he’ll have to put them back on after he cleans them. He finds the mini vacuum in the bottom of the closet, tucked away behind shoes and coats and scarfs and goes at the sofa with that too, vacuuming out the crumbs and the bits of paper and the change that’s accumulated here over time. Over days and months and years, like pages turning, almost. Chapters gone by.

The kitchen may be the most complicated.

It’s unlike the other rooms. The bedroom was half-lived in, because Louis had relegated himself to a side of the bed. Had assigned himself floor space for his clothes because the closet felt too big on its own, all emptied of band t-shirts and acid jeans and Zayn’s favorite brands. The living room was an ode to the past, of sorts, outdated magazines and old papers shoved under the cushions. It was easy for Louis to throw those things away, because they were meaningless. Trinkets, in a way. Cheap reminders of a book long since shelved.