A friend of mine shares a Netflix account with her ex-husband. Their divorce is final, and as they feel
their way around new, independent lives, they haven’t gotten around to
dealing with some of the things they developed together—a joint account at a
food co-op, a gym membership, and a sweet yellow lab they shift back and forth
between apartments. And Netflix.
“It’s fine,” she shrugs.
“Well, all except the Netflix thing.”
It is convenient and certainly financially beneficial—but can
get a little awkward. “I can click on
his profile at any time and see what he’s been watching… and he can do the same
to me,” she says. “The other night, I
wanted to watch something I never
would have watched with him, because he would have hated it and been
uncomfortable, and he would have disapproved.” She laughs, a little bitter. “Which is why we’re divorced.” And then, slowly, as if just realizing it,
she says, “It’s shocking, really, how intimate it is to share a Netflix account
with someone.”
Intimacy creeps up in surprising places. Working in my office a few days ago, I took
some time to clear out some of my files from the school year. I paused to go
through my “memories” box, a plastic tub full of photographs, notes and cards I
want to keep forever. The things in this box
tell the story of who I am and what I value.
It’s not just work stuff, either; in an effort to streamline my
mementos, I’ve tucked some other things into the box, too. A letter my grandfather wrote to me, years
ago, when I tried to patch up an argument between he and my father. Sonograms of two babies I lost to miscarriage,
just weeks after hearing their heartbeats for the first time.
The note that accompanied the flowers my editor sent the day my book
came out. A rejection letter from the only
graduate school to which I applied my last year of college—a letter that
propelled me into two restless, lost years of silent raging against The System,
living in disgusting apartments, and paying the rent as a bartender, slinging
cocktails and 32-ounce beer.
As I poked through the box, I felt like we all do when we
remember these things—nostalgic, sad, grateful, vulnerable. Then, this thought flashed at me: I
wonder if anyone else has seen the things in this box?
Because people are in and out of my office all the time when
I’m not there. I don’t mind at all; in
fact, when someone needs space to work, or a moment with the door closed, I
always offer it up. It’s a space
available to anyone, anytime. It’s only
locked at night, and even then, night custodians could poke around all they
wanted, and I’d never know it. I
literally have no idea how many people go in and out of my office over the
course of a day, week, or year.
Which made me realize that at any point, anyone could come
in and poke around in my stuff. This
box, sure, but also anything else I have strewn about: My notebook with my to-do list; the bulletin
board, pinned with cards and quotes; cards I prop up on my bookshelf. There is my computer desktop itself, and any application
I might accidentally leave open; there’s a stack of papers and emails I’ve
printed into a stack to deal with when I get a moment. My office is like a social media
page I can’t control, unless I shred everything and make my work area sterile
and empty. Which I don’t want to
do. So, it offers constant glimpses of what
I’m thinking and doing, what I’ve thought and done in the past.
To be clear, none of this bothers me, and I am not ashamed
of anything in my memory box, or in my office, or anywhere else, for that matter. And I genuinely wouldn’t even care if someone
saw everything in it. But, like my
friend’s Netflix account, it’s jarringly intimate, the way the things we keep around us serve as a mirror to who we have grown to
be—and cannot ever really be ours alone.
