Part 1 – Part 2
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 paused 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.
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.
