You know what, I'm just going to write about it.

I grew up on a farm that was more of an acreage than a farm. But we called it a farm. The farm. It's the setting of 90% of my dreams. It's a memory of a place where I was free to wander. I could look out and see nothing, and see everything, where I could lay on an incline until any thoughts I had planned battled with fears of a horse stepping on my chest if I fell asleep. Where a trickle of slough-yellow water going over a bank was called a waterfall, in a house that was never really clean, peeling red paint off the south side where the deck is that I crawled under to catch a salamander when I was eight.

I visited the farm on my time off from school. I went there to collect any belongings of mine that still reside there. My graduation dress. Boxes of childhood possessions that I had been forced to sort through before I moved out at eighteen. What to keep and what to throw away.

It's been almost seven months since the news came out. My brother-in-law will no longer be my brother-in-law; my sister, hurriedly etching over etching. Church friends asking how my family is doing. How are they doing, really.

What went wrong? Whose fault is it? Did they really have enough marital problems to justify a separation? They didn't ask those questions. It must be hard on your mom and dad, they say. At least they don't have children.

I haven't even seen him since before everyone knew. A clean break, I keep telling myself. Meanwhile, they're still sharing the same space I grew up in. The house oddly clean. A piece of loose-leaf with names of DVDs in neat writing, list form.

His.

Hers.

I turned the four boxes of memories into one. Journals. Baby blankets. The marred head of a wooden lizard my dog chewed up.

I couldn't throw it away.