The Last 5 Years

 

I miss my toilet paper holder.

 

When I look at what my life has become, there’s a lot to miss: a normal life, a normal home, a normal marriage.  I miss my friends and my job and going to New York to catch a show.  I miss sleeping through the night and having uninterrupted telephone conversations.  Oh, and interrupted showers and uninterrupted meals.  And going outside to get the mail.

 

Today, though, I mostly miss NYC and my toilet paper holder.  To satisfy my show-tune withdrawal, I’m listening to Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last 5 Years” which is one of my all-time favorites and oddly, it’s making me miss my toilet paper holder even more.

 

In it, Jamie sings of his wife:

“All that I ask for

Is one little corner –

One private room at the back of my heart.

Tell her I found one

She sends out battalions

To claim it and blow it apart.”

 

His wife is clingy and has invaded every inch of his life.   He responds to her smothering by having an affair, an attempt to claim back “one private room.”

 

I’m not going to have an affair, but I do want my toilet paper holder back.  It’s freestanding and beautiful and, frankly, I paid a little more for it than I should have but I loved it and wanted it so I bought it.  And now, it’s jammed in the corner of the guest room.

 

Because it’s free-standing, there isn’t a good place to put it when Gary needs to go to the bathroom in his wheelchair so his average trip to the bathroom results in me moving it 6 times.  And every time I pick it up to move it and move it again, it annoys me a little more.   I won’t have to do that anymore, because I’m tired of moving it dozens of times a day so this evening, I shoved it in a corner.

 

Well, close to a corner.  Corners are hard to come by these days as our house is now brimming with multiple wheelchairs and walkers and canes and a lift chair and a stair glide and a shower chair and a bedside potty and urinals and oxygen and a hospital bed and pulls-ups and wipes and creams and ointments.  It seems less like a home than a medical warehouse and, frankly, it doesn’t feel like there is room for me.

 

All that I ask for

is one little corner-

One private room.

 

But there isn’t a little corner for the toilet paper holder or a private room for me.

He sent out battalions to claim it and blew it apart.