Read Lessons in Letting Go for Free Online Page A

around the lower reaches of Level Five. Now, with everything out in the open, I realised I was scarily close to leaping straight up to a fully fledged Level Seven. I rubbed the back of my neck. I had thought the list would comfort me. Instead, it was giving me heart palpitations.
    This spurred me into a kind of panicky action. I made a wall out of the boxes to separate the open-plan lounge and kitchen, threw a rug over the top and convinced myself I was interior decorating. I promised myself that one day I would go through all my photographs and put them in albums, that I would go through the garbage bag of stamps, soak the paper off them and put them in order and that I would go through the little suitcase of moth-eaten doll’s clothes, wash and mend them and give them to charity. Then I sat down on the insect-riddled carpet and cried. I avoided the grief of ending a long-term relationship and instead sobbed over a box of unlabelled video tapes.
    As time went on, things got slightly better. Adam would visit and fuelled by champagne, we would hammer together bookshelves and a weird little bathroom cabinet that was missing one side. We bought side tables and chests and baskets and eventually we found enough room on the floor to carve a path from the bedroom through the lounge and into the kitchen. Adam thought we’d made a good start. I didn’t dare tell him this was as good as it was going to get.
    At night I would go to bed and listen to the drug lords either partying or fighting. Sometimes the security door would buzz in the early hours of the morning and after ten minutes of no one answering, I would fly out of bed and let in some obviously high kid and yell at him all the way to his door. They probably thought they lived next door to a dragon who wore Winnie-the-Pooh pyjamas.
    In the evenings I would waste my time rearranging and re-stacking piles of god-knows-what, trying to find the magical configuration that would enable me to feel like I was in control. The fear of doing something I might later regret overruled any desire to throw something out. If I threw out an old placemat, I might all of a sudden find myself completely unmoored from my past. If I threw out a cardigan my mother had given to me for my twenty-third birthday, I might destroy the family bond that held us to each other. We don’t call our possessions ‘belongings’ for nothing and without Thomas beside me it felt like my belongings were the only things holding me together.
    I tried very hard not to reminisce about how different the place I had lived in with him had been. Our flat had been almost new, with an air conditioner and enormous balcony. It had wooden venetian blinds and polished floorboards. It even had its own entrance, separate to the rest of the apartments, and I never tired of climbing up our little terracotta-tiled staircase, opening the big front gate and stepping onto our decking. We had everything we needed in our little flat: we had new crockery and stainless-steel saucepans, we had a new quilt and fresh linen, we had just the right amount of towels and all of our clothes fitted into the enormous wardrobe with ease. In the house of horrors I now called home, even the blinds were so old they were filled with holes. The blue evening light would shine through them, leaving spooky spots on the walls. It was like living in an eighties music clip.
    When I left, Thomas had given me his sofa, his coffee table, a load of kitchen stuff and our doona. Everywhere I looked, there he was. And where he wasn’t, there was some other reminder of a life lived years ago. Nothing looked like a life lived now. This wasn’t how I had expected it to be. Whenever I couldn’t stop myself thinking about it, my mind drifted to imagining Thomas on his own in our old flat and I wondered what it looked like now. Probably clean. And uncluttered. He had always liked new stuff. In a world without me, he would have sat at Level Three. Still, I wondered if he