BeforeCalifornia.com

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

The last time I came to the box it was by choice, not necessity.

Luke had called me up the day after my vodka-fueled excursion into the past to go on excitedly about his date and although I did my best to sound equally enthusiastic, he saw through it. It’s funny how you can know somebody so well that you can guess what they’re thinking without ever seeing their face. Luke has more of a knack for it than I do, but I think he has an unfair advantage since I’m so easy to read. He probably pieced together the fact that I sounded a little down with the knowledge that I’d found the shoebox a few days before; he might be a bimbo sometimes but he’s not an idiot.

He suggested we go for drinks, which was out of the question with my head spinning like a fairground ride from hell. He told me he would have dragged me out for retail therapy but he had to work during the day and to be honest I was kind of glad. I didn’t think I could handle him on a queasy stomach.

We wound up not seeing each other for the next few nights, but when the inevitable meet-up went down he insisted on dragging me out to our usual bar, no excuses.

The thing with Luke is you can’t not have a good time when he’s around. He’s the voice of the devil on your shoulder telling you there’s no harm in having another shot as much as he’s the one steering you by the arm away from the overly-drunk guy who just won’t leave you alone. There were a couple of those that night and Luke was there to tell them to back off or, where that failed, turn on the charms in a bid to scare them away.

After two glasses of vodka-and-cranberry—my signature drink, with which Luke wasn’t afraid to ply me—I was a little more willing to talk about what was on my mind.

‘It’s stupid,’ I said, in a voice slightly slurred by alcohol and tinged with emotion. It was probably a good thing I opened my mouth after only a couple of drinks or the floodgates would’ve burst in a torrent of humiliating sobs.

‘What’s stupid, doll?’

‘This. Everything.’ A grand wave of my hand to signal to the bar at large, then a sigh. ‘How long’s it been? Years, right?’

‘This is about her again, isn’t it?’ he asked.

Like it needed clarification—she’d been the only thing playing on my mind for days. I gave a shrug by way of replying and helped myself to some of Luke’s drink before pushing myself up from my stool to go get more.

When I came back with two glasses in hand, he had a look on his face that told me he wasn’t about to let the subject pass. I had to wonder what I was thinking when I opened my mouth—still wonder that to this day—when I wasn’t even nearly ready to talk about it. Maybe all that crap I’d been bottling up just had to go somewhere and I thought confiding in Luke would make things better. I was wrong.

See, Luke’s my best friend. We’d die for each other, or at least do something stupid and reckless, and I can’t even count all the times we’ve done huge favours for one another that we’d never ask of someone else. The problem is that we know each other too well and as a result, we’ve each perfected a technique over the years of saying exactly what needs to be said in delicate situations—which, unfortunately, is rarely what the other wants to hear.

‘You just need to get over it,’ was the first thing out of his mouth. ‘You were over it. The only thing different now is you found that stupid little box and you let it upset you again.’

I think it was the fact that he was so spot-on that rendered me speechless, so I couldn’t open my mouth to intercept him. It seemed he was on a roll, anyway.

‘D’you remember how long it took for you to get past it?’ He had one eyebrow cocked. I guess, as the one person I consistently turned to back in the beginning, he wasn’t too impressed to find things reverting to how they used to be. ‘You were crying for days. You kept checking your messages and your emails and your letterbox every ten minutes “just in case” and when you’d come back from it empty-handed, you’d have this sad little look on your face and we’d humour you and tell you to keep hanging in there just so you’d stop looking so pathetic for five seconds.

‘I’m not doing that again. I’m not watching you mope around like a dog waiting for her owner to come home. I’m sorry, but it was bad enough the first time.’

Once again, he had a point. He was the voice of reason and that drove me mad—crushed me, because he was the one person who should’ve been on my side and humoured me just one last time, but instead he was playing tough love and I wasn’t ready for it.

And then I realised that I wouldn’t be ready for the truth as long as I kept playing the ownerless puppy act. The only way I would be ready was if Luke slapped me across the face with it and, being my best friend, he was more than happy to do so. I felt the anger that had welled up within me disperse just as quickly as it had appeared. I laughed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. There was a little bit of a wobble to my words, but that was okay. ‘I know I’m being a dick.’

When he slipped down from his stool and moved over to my side, he gave a muffled ‘You are’ into my ear as he squeezed me tightly in a hug. I punched his side in retaliation and he jumped away with a laugh. We didn’t bring it up again.

In a normal friendship, maybe we would have talked it over—spent hours bitching about what happened, talked it out late into the wee small hours until my voice was raw from crying. That wasn’t us, though. That wasn’t what I needed. What Luke was essentially saying in his blunt way was that I’d gotten over it once before and I hadn’t done that by allowing myself to wallow. Finding the box again didn’t make me a different person than the one who’d managed to move on at some point without even realising it.

I’d sobered up for the most part by the time I got home so I felt like I had my wits about me as I stepped into the walk-in wardrobe and dragged the box out from its makeshift home under a pile of wadded-up laundry, behind my stockpile of shoes. What little alcohol was left in my bloodstream lent me some courage, but with it I found my grip on my emotions still wasn’t as strong as I would have liked it to have been. I knew it was a matter of now or never, though, and ‘never’ just wasn’t an option—not if Luke had anything to say about it.

My fingers found their way to the ticket stubs as though they knew instinctively they were the only things left to look at, or maybe that was just my own subconscious. Either way, the scant weight of them in my palm was oddly reassuring. I flicked through them mechanically, not entirely sure what I was looking for but positive I’d know it when I found it.

There. One Adult ticket for the 9:15 showing of some generic romantic comedy—you know the type. I wasn’t looking for the name since the movie wasn’t what mattered that night, anyway. My fingers ran over the tears I’d nervously made in the edges of the ticket years before and I found myself there again, found myself standing with her outside the cinema while she puffed on a menthol cigarette and jogged her weight from one foot to the other to keep warm.

I’m just gonna head home.

I still remember how I couldn’t trust myself on whether or not she’d actually said that aloud, or if I’d imagined it. We’d both been silent for so long and my head was so full of my own paranoid stream-of-consciousness that I hadn’t been sure. She’d turned away after that, dropped the cigarette without putting it out and gone home.

For days, weeks, I had agonised over what I’d said that night. When I had turned to her in the middle of the movie, big goofy grin on my face, and told her that we’d be like the parents of the leading man if we ever got married, I hadn’t thought anything of it. She’d tensed up right away, though; the next two hours of the movie were spent wondering if I’d done something wrong or if I was imagining things.

I never saw her again after that night. The city was big enough to get lost in if you wanted to badly enough, but I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that she left. You dump someone and cut them out of your life, it’s probably not that big of a stretch to walk away from the rest of your life too. I have to wonder if I’ve just been telling myself that because the thought of her being in the same city as me all this time is too painful to live with.

Maybe it wasn’t that one thing I said in the middle of the movie. Maybe it had been a long time coming, maybe that was the last straw, maybe it was all just a shitty coincidence. Maybe I’ll drive myself to an early grave one day running through it all in my head over and over and over again.

Back in the present, with the shoebox clutched in one hand and the ticket in the other, I let myself cry. Ten minutes must have passed at least; by the end of it my throat hurt, my chest hurt, and my face was a snotty mess. I felt drained and, as I padded through to the bathroom to clean myself up, I felt better. Not better in the sense that I was over things again, just… Just less terrible.

I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the box and I probably never will. As much as the keepsakes I’ve kept in there trigger the sort of memories that send me into an emotional tailspin, there’s some good stuff in there, too. If I were to get rid of the box, if I were to be reminded of her by something entirely random and unrelated one day, I’d have nothing there to prove to me that there were good times back then to go along with the bad.

I got over it the first time, even though it felt for months as though I genuinely never would. I got over it to the point that it wasn’t the first thing on my mind every damn day of the week and, with time, I started to think about it even less until I ceased to think about it at all. Finding the shoebox proved to me that I could get over it again; I knew as I put the innocuous little Converse box away exactly where I’d found it that I’d be dooming myself to repeat the exact same scenario all over again a few years down the line, but I realised even in my tentative state that I could deal with that when it came to it. If I had to relive it a hundred times over, I would—I’d move on a hundred times, too. The good memories, the few things I had left of her, were worth the risk.

You never really reach a point where you realise you’re over someone—but maybe that’s because there’s no such thing as ever truly being over somebody you once loved. You carry on with your life, sure, and you fill the space they used to occupy with something else… There’s always going to be a tiny part of them lodged in your mind, though. Lodged there, waiting to be brought to the surface again.

It helps to tell myself that she probably still thinks of me. She probably works just as hard to push thoughts of me to the back of her mind, and whether or not she does that with any degree of success, it’s something to keep me going.

We were a funny pair, the both of us. It was good while it lasted, but that time we spent together—like all good memories—belongs in the past.

I can live with that.

I can.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

I woke up a couple of nights later with a dry mouth, a light head and a knot in the pit of my stomach. If I’d been having a bad dream, I couldn’t remember it now that I was awake and I really had no desire to try to recall it. With most bad dreams, that sense of unease tends to go away by itself as you rationalise that it was just that—a dream. That night, however, I couldn’t seem to shake the feeling.

It was only once the post-sleep fogginess had cleared that the box crept into my thoughts again; if my bed hadn’t been so warm, I might have gone to the closet and pulled it out to have another look at it, likely dooming myself to a sleepless night. Laziness and cosiness—and a general reluctance to make myself miserable—kept me curled up under the covers, but even in the scant light of the moon through the blinds my eyes were trained on the closet door. Knowing what was in there, hidden away in a corner behind my shoes, was somehow worse than biting the bullet.

The box didn’t call to me, exactly. It was more like it parked itself in my consciousness, silent but impossible to ignore, and the more I tried to distract myself by planning what I had to do during the day, the more pointless it seemed. I’d given myself an ultimatum by five-fifteen; if I hadn’t stopped thinking about it by six a.m., I’d get out of bed and open it.

I guess I drifted off at some point—I never did get around to opening the box, and when morning came I managed to maintain some semblance of normality. Work was similarly uneventful, although my thoughts drifted from time to time and it took some sheer force of will not to dwell. It was only once a colleague stopped and asked me if I was okay—apparently I’d been glaring at my computer screen for the better part of ten minutes—that I realised I had a problem.

Problems, in my world, are most easily solved with alcohol. It’s something Luke will attest to as well and between wardrobe malfunctions and boyfriend troubles, he seems to have no shortage of drama in his life. He’s the type of guy who’ll get ridiculously, deliriously drunk, sob bitterly for an hour and bounce back with some fully-fledged plan for how he’s going to make the best of things and show the world he’s nobody’s bitch. In spite of his best efforts he normally ends the night hunched over a toilet spilling the contents of his stomach into the bowl, but come morning he’s always in a better state than the night before, hangover-from-hell notwithstanding.

Luke wasn’t free that night—he had a date all lined up, and even though I knew he would have cancelled to keep me company I didn’t give him the chance. I didn’t much feel like dragging any of our other friends into my self-indulgent misery (nor did I feel particularly inclined to explain what was bothering me, when they inevitably asked), so the most sensible option seemed to be to spend the night in the company of a bottle of vodka with cranberry juice to wash it down.

I could feel the box there, always, just nagging at the corner of my mind. Three strong glasses of vodka-and-cranberry in and I was starting to think the damn thing really was pulling me towards it, like it had sunk its hook in me the way she had all those years earlier.

I’d like to say I was under a spell as I trudged from my draughty, fluorescent-lit kitchen through to the bedroom, but in reality I knew exactly what I was doing. The booze only made me more foolhardy and it seemed like a good idea at the time to obey the impulse that told me to do the one thing that would only put me in a worse mood than before.

Next beneath the cards, tinfoil heart and tortoise necklace was a strip of photographs. It wasn’t a sequence of us two together, making adoring eyes at each other the way you always see in the movies; it was her on her own, making goofy faces at the camera—at me. I’d dragged her to the train station one day to get a set of passport photos for a job interview and stepped into one of the photo-booths outside the café and emerged a little while later to find she’d made good use of the booth next to it. When I complained that my own photos had come out looking terrible—‘mug-shot’ was the phrase I used, I believe—she had swapped her photos for mine and told me to use them instead. I didn’t do as she suggested, of course, but I did keep the pictures.

The very first one was always my favourite; the booth took it before she was ready, before she could find a suitably ridiculous pose. She was frozen in an uncertain little half-frown while she tried to decide which pose to adopt and it felt to me like the first time I’d ever seen her without her guard up. She said she hated it because she had a double-chin in it but I knew that was bullshit. I knew she’d seen the same thing I’d seen, and it had scared her.

The next thing I found in the box was a little more mundane and even she probably couldn’t have told you the significance. A paper clip might not normally hold memories for most, but it did for me—just a normal, untarnished paper clip that could have been mistaken for any other. I knew it was unique, though, because I knew where it had come from.

You’ll think I’m a ridiculous sap for this, but here goes: right around the start of our relationship, once it went past the point of ‘Will they ever hook up?’ and turned into something real, we got into the habit of slipping each other notes. We’d each try to do it so the other wouldn’t notice, getting increasingly crafty each time; once I went to great pains to nick her purse from her handbag just to slip a scrap of paper into the clear plastic holder in the middle of it. The paper only had the word ‘Loser’ on it, but she’d squealed with delight when she found it later on as she pulled out her purse to pay for a coffee.

She was always better than me, though, if only because of her subtlety. She’d pick something so obvious that I should have been able to spot it in an instant, only I never did. That’s where the paper clip came in.

I work as a clerical assistant. I did back then, too, but at a different company and for a fair sight less than I earn now. Work never really stayed at the office, so I’d find myself taking home folders full of hastily-scribbled notes that needed to be typed up into something more coherent by the next morning. It was in one such folder that she’d hidden her note, clipping it to the very first page in the bunch. The front of it said ’Important’ and because it had been labelled as such, I’d done my best to avoid looking at it until the very end of the day because I expected it to be nothing but bad news—probably a manager giving me some extra task to add to my workload or pushing one of my deadlines forward yet again. Instead I’d opened it up to find her familiar sloping handwriting bearing the words ‘Take it easy once in a while, nerd’.

I stuck the note up in the corner of my mirror where I could see it every morning and where it stayed for months until it fell off one day and disappeared, likely sucked up into the vacuum cleaner on a rare occasion during which I felt compelled to clean. I found the paper clip she’d used buried in the pocket of my cardigan ages afterwards, though, and had known immediately where it came from. It’s weird how a piece of metal can hold so many memories.

I’d seen enough; the vodka was starting to make my head spin and I knew I’d either cry or vomit if I didn’t put the box away right there and then. Déjà vu struck my particularly strongly as I realised I had done the exact same thing days before; I had done it again in the vain hope that something might be different this time.

I never did finish the bottle that night, but I did Luke proud in drinking until it seemed like a good idea to tearfully warble along to my favourite sad songs. The next morning I woke up with a mouth like an ashtray and the mother of all headaches. Worst of all, the shoebox was still on my mind and now I couldn’t stop thinking about the damn paper clip.

So much for feeling better.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

You never really reach a point where you realise you’re over someone. There’s no light bulb illumination, no eureka moment; they just cease to be a part of your everyday thoughts and that’s that. If you were to notice that you’d stopped thinking about them, technically you’d be thinking about them again—and it’s hard to get them out of your head after that, isn’t it?

The fact of the matter is I hadn’t thought of her for such a long time that she might as well have never existed, and things were better that way. I’d moved on. I’d healed. Maybe I would have lived my life without ever thinking of her again if it hadn’t been for Luke.

Luke’s one of those guys who rarely pauses to think of anybody but himself, but when he does he goes out of his way to be selfless. It’s a bit of a weird paradox, really, that one day he could bring you breakfast-in-bed and the next he could let a door slam in your face simply because it didn’t occur to him to hold it open for you.

That morning, Luke needed a favour and when Luke needs a favour, there’s no way of getting out of it unless you want to unleash his sulking upon yourself. He worked nights at a gay club at the time, taking part in a drag act as one of the club’s more popular DJs, Missy. Luke used to call Missy his butterfly persona; on any given day he might fade into the background, but whenever Missy came out to play it was kind of hard not to take notice. He liked to think of Missy as his excuse to say everything he didn’t have the balls to say in his own clothes. I thought it a little ironic that it was only by taking on a drag persona and insisting everybody call him a ‘she’ that he managed to gain said proverbial balls, but I’ve never gotten around to saying as much to him out loud.

Anyway—Luke (and Missy) needed a favour, which was how I wound up in my closet digging through my clothes for something for him to wear for his show that night. He’d had some wardrobe malfunction involving zippers and back fat and apparently he didn’t have any cross-dressing friends to call upon for help, which was how I came into the picture. He’s pretty slender for a guy, so apparently his only option was to borrow something from me.

I had sorted through most of my dresses and deemed them too conservative when I found it. Luke was talking to me at the time, jabbering away about how removing his nail polish each morning before heading to his day job was wreaking havoc upon his cuticles; I guess I must not have replied with appropriate sympathy as he marched into my room a moment later and demanded to know whether or not I was listening to him. I was, but only partly. My attention was trained in large part upon the shoebox in my hands.

We all probably have one of these boxes, or we have had one at some point—and if it’s not a shoebox it’s a packing case or box from an iron, or maybe just a virtual folder hidden away in the darkest recesses of a computer. The contents of these boxes are seldom the same, either, but the feelings evoked are usually identical: nostalgia, along with more than a little remorse.
My shoebox was a black one, belonging to a pair of Converse that weren’t even mine. They had been hers, actually, which only made my discovery of the box that much worse. I didn’t have to open the lid to know what I’d find in there, but I did it anyway and regretted it immediately.

Ticket stubs from the cinema; novelty cards from birthdays and Hallmark holidays; the necklace that had broken at some point and never been fixed. There were other things, too, but those were the first to catch my eye. The necklace was an image that would stay burned in my mind for quite some time, a tortoise with fake little emeralds set into its shell. She was the only person who’d ever really understood my little obsession with tortoises.

‘Oh, doll.’

It was the pity in Luke’s tone, more than the sound of his voice, that broke me from my reverie. It’s always a bad thing when he pulls the old ‘Oh, doll’—we’ve known each other for so long that he knows my feelings before I do sometimes and this was one of those occasions.

‘I forgot I had this,’ I said, doing my best to ignore the look in his eyes that said he was getting ready to rush to my aid if I started to cry. He normally hates being around people when they’re crying and I’m the only person he’ll do it for, but I was determined not to give him the need this time. I held strong and, without another word, popped the lid on the box. It was back where I had found it a moment later and anybody walking into the room at that exact point would have found me riffling through my clothes once more as though nothing were amiss in the slightest.

*I tried not to think of the shoebox that evening once Luke had gone, tried not to let my mind wander into the even darker territory of what the contents of the box represented. To my credit, I didn’t open the box again that night, but I did lie awake thinking about it. I couldn’t remember what I had dreamt about when I woke up yet I was sure I dreamt of her; from the moment I blearily opened my eyes, my stomach felt heavy and my heart ached like it was four years earlier and I was going through it all once again.

My willpower failed me with barely twenty minutes to go before I had to leave for work; the knowledge that it was sitting there, just begging to be opened, was too much for me.

The tortoise necklace came out first; I set it aside so I wouldn’t be tempted to look at it for too long and turned my attention to the novelty cards on top of the pile. Some of them still made me laugh as I looked through them. I remembered the startled titter I had given upon receiving the handmade one with the words ‘You’re Going to Die!’ emblazoned across the front until I had opened it to find the words ‘So you might as well enjoy yourself and down a few pints to speed along the process’ written inside. That had been her sense of humour down to a T and I guess it became mine after a while, the way couples who are together for too long start to dress and act and think like each other until their friends have to stage an intervention (and before you ask, yes Luke was the one to step in).

Next in the pile, beneath the stack of cards that was significantly larger than I had remembered it being, was the heart she’d made for me out of tinfoil. This was before we were even going out, back when my feelings for her could still be classified as a crush and her feelings for me were those of an oblivious best friend. She’d been eating a sandwich, cheese and jam—just one of her quirks—and fidgeting with the tinfoil wrapping while we chatted where we sat on a bench outside the university library. During a lull in the conversation she had proudly extended her hand to me with the heart-shaped chunk of aluminium foil in it and jokingly said that it would be something to remember me by when she ran away to Hollywood.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t look at any more of those trinkets, couldn’t pretend that it didn’t hurt to have those memories flood my thoughts once more. Tinfoil heart, cards and tortoise all went back into their rightful places, the lid went back on the box and the box went back on the top shelf of my closet never to be seen again.

At least, that was the vow I made at that precise moment. It wouldn’t be long before I caved in again, but that’s a story for another day.