You take down frames and mirrors, pack boxes full of old books and sweaters. Do you remember what it felt like when the books first landed their space on your shelf? Do you remember the day you first washed her sweaters and folded them into your drawer?
Did that drawer soon become her drawer?
You can’t remember. It’s been so long; a decade, even. The books she read weren’t interesting to you then. However lonely is it that now you can’t put any of them down?
You sit at the corner bar, chewing beef jerky, reading line after line. You see tear stains, the corners folded because she never used a bookmark. You were angry when you bought her some for Christmas, but now when you see the indented pages, your anger dissipates into a tough gray oblivion.
You came across her journal, the one she threw into your lap over and over and over again, because she wanted you to know; she wanted you to read. You didn’t listen, did you?
The journal is full of purple prose — fifty thousand words that, then, you thought were useless. Now you stare at the white lined pages, the pen marks and doodles, the intricately woven fictional words derived from Latin; you barely remember. Then arrives the stupid, small and stupid definitions of them creeping up every time you flip the page. You start to scream and throw the box; papers rip, books fly. The drawings she made of her characters, black hair and blue eyes resembling yours.
And then you see every old chapter scratched out. Your heart rips like the snags in the paper and holes in the words; left behind with such fierceness, much like how she left you.