Part 1 – Part 2
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.
