I spent most of the day boxing up books and other such personal belongings. It didn’t make me feel sad, just a tad lost. The end of this relationship has been coming for months. It’s been bunk for such a long time that to walk away from it brought nothing but relief. But still. The end of love always leaves a scar, and the more you believed it was true, the deeper the wound. So yeah, I spent several hours sifting through my shit in a house that was once meant to house a healthy relationship. It did, briefly, but now all I have to show for it are boxes of belongings piled indifferently in the corner of a room that will soon forget me. I don’t think about that, though. My thoughts reside in happier times. Strange how such memories still reverberate through my brain as if I experienced them not several years ago but only yesterday. I threw a good deal of books away. I’ll never read them. There’s something genuinely agonizing about owning a book you know you’ll never read. It gnaws at my bones like a hangover, and the sight of those books ready to be recycled filled me with a deep sense of shame. When I finished boxing up, I sifted through some old photos. The sight of my younger self smiling a genuine, childish smile caused me to cry, and I couldn’t help but curl up on the floor devoid of the energy or willpower to do anything else. The dogs surrounded me—licking me—thinking I was playing. I imagined what it would be like if I suffered a heart attack and they chewed my face off. Like that French woman.

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US