I want to tell you that I said something clever right then. Something sharp and funny that made the whole row laugh.
I didn’t.
I turned back around in my seat. I pulled my right arm off the armrest. I tucked it into my lap.
I made myself smaller.
That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done.
Use your other armrest. Don’t bother me.
I’d heard that before.
Not those exact words. But close enough.
My name is Leah Moreno. I’m thirty-eight years old. I teach art to seventh and eighth graders at a middle school outside Boston.
I was flying to Seattle for my niece’s tenth birthday.
My sister, Gabi, lives in a little blue house in Ballard with her husband and her two kids. Sophie, who was turning ten. And Mateo, who’s six and thinks I’m the coolest person alive because I can draw any dinosaur he names.
I hadn’t been out to see them in three years.
That’s a long story. The short version is that I was married for eleven years to a man named Doug, and Doug didn’t like to travel, and Doug didn’t like my sister, and Doug didn’t like it when I went places without him.
So mostly, I didn’t go places.
Doug wasn’t a monster. I want to be fair about that. He never hit me. He never screamed. He paid his half of the bills. He remembered my birthday most years.
He just took up space.
All of it.
He’d stretch out on the couch with his feet on the coffee table, and I’d sit in the armchair. He’d spread out diagonally across the bed, and I’d sleep curled up on the edge with one arm hanging off. He’d turn the TV to whatever he wanted to watch, and I’d read in the kitchen. He’d talk over me at dinner parties, and I’d smile and nod and wait for him to finish.
When I said something about it, he’d say, “Leah, it’s not a big deal. Just sit somewhere else.”
Use your other armrest.
For eleven years, I used the other armrest.
I got smaller and smaller until I didn’t even notice I was doing it.
We got divorced last spring.
It was my idea. That surprised everybody. Doug most of all.
I was sitting in the armchair one night in February, grading seventh-grade self-portraits, while Doug lay on the couch with his feet on the coffee table watching football. And one of the self-portraits was by a girl named Tamika. She’d drawn herself very, very small, in the bottom corner of a huge empty page.
At the bottom, she’d written: This is me. I don’t take up much room.
I sat there and looked at that drawing for a long time.
Then I looked across the living room at my husband’s feet on the coffee table.
Then I looked down at myself. Curled up in the armchair. Knees pulled up. Arms tucked in.
I didn’t take up much room either.
I filed for divorce in March.
