Work Text:
£30.99. That’s how much it cost.
I put down the big cardboard box on the kitchen table, spilling tea everywhere, breaking a mug and trying to hold back the sinking feeling of emptiness that was about to settle deep in my chest. I didn’t like coffee anymore since you’d left, and my brain made this remark as I watched that English breakfast Twinnings drip from the kitchen counter onto the broken tiles and my black socks.
I didn’t know what was in the box, and I was dying to know, and that killed me even more.
The bell had rung at 9:47, at the same time as the kettle came to a boil, and I put on slippers as I poured the tea into the mug. The postman didn’t seem to mind my face of distress as I opened the door in a hurry, and signed the package in my horrible, left-handed handwriting. It wasn’t until I’d shut the door and turned to go back up the stairs that I realised it was addressed to you, and felt like I was going to choke and vomit and cry all at the same time.
Your smell had just washed off my clothes and my sheets and my carpet, and I was beginning to forget the feeling of your hands on my face, and the last box of things had been picked up weeks ago, and I had already filled the blank the lack of your DVDs had left on my shelf, and your shoes were no longer in the hallway, your socks no longer spread all over the apartment, and I had unmarked all the pages of my life that you had touched.
But this. Bloody. Package.
I didn’t even know what it contained; you must’ve ordered it weeks and weeks ago, it came all the way from where you are now, and we were already broken up and what was I supposed to do with it, I thought in a rushed panic. Was I supposed to open it? Was it ok to open it? Was it even legal?
With a deep breath, I took the scissors from the kitchen drawer, approaching the package like a doctor approaches a patient’s body when they’re about to do surgery – trying very hard not to imagine a corpse.
Your smell on my sheets, your playlists on my computer, your face behind my eyelids, your duvet on my bed, your note books on my desk. And your fucking socks. All ceasing to exist without you, all corpses spread within my skin.
It all rushed through my mind as I approached the package in slow motion. I felt so stupid and ridiculous as one half of me told me to just do it and the other one just kept thinking about your eyes, your eyes, your eyes.
My hand slipped onto the side of the package, wanting to throw it against a wall, delicately touch it, and rip it to shreds at the same time. Just as you did me back when we were still together and I loved you and you didn’t love me anymore, and I pretended not to see it until the day you decided to leave.
Once I had finally opened it, I couldn’t tell what I felt when I saw that ridiculous neon colored coat you said you’d buy me because I wore too much black, back when you still loved me and I loved you, too. I wanted to cry into it, and sleep wrapped inside it, and scream into it, light in on fire and throw it out a window. Just as we did each other back when you nearly didn’t love me anymore. And now you don’t and I lay in the black hole this package seemed to be.
(I never did decide what do to with it, and it ended up gathering dust in the back of my closet, never really getting to see the light. Its existence left me in the sort of limbo I hate to be in, where it not being there was painful and it being there was painful as well. I pretended it never existed, taking comfort in the fact that it actually did.)
I don’t know if you even remember buying it, and what a waste of money that was, and what a waste of time we were. I don’t think our relationship was even worth £30.99.
(And my heart contradicts my thoughts, and £30.99. Much more than £30.99.)
Your hair, and your eyes, and your lips, and your socks, and your feet, and your stupid jeans that you never washed, and all the times I cried, and the day you told me you loved me and I didn’t say it back right away (fucking idiot), and when I did tell you, and your mouth and teeth, and all that money we spent on the sofa because we’d thought that would solve our problems, and the fact that we ignored them until I turned into the ball of mess and tears I still am, and you turned into someone who forgot how to be the one to say ‘I love you’ first.
I’m still in love with you after all this time, and the tea is still on the floor and dripping from the edge of the counter and I am holding back a cry that never seemed to leave my throat, and it takes ages and it reminds me of the day you left, when I felt like a dust speck on a windshield and I hate you I hate you I hate you.
£30.99.
Was it worth it?