Artifact

Fiction: Relationship relics draw the past and present together.

I confuse and tire myself going over what I did and did not tell him. He persists with the assertion that he loves me. Will always love me. Will never love anyone else quite the way he loves me. But I’m not sure who he’s talking about. 

I’ve been a dozen different women since last October. The submissive supporter, the dauntless drama queen, the laugh and the lips. All talk and tribute. The movement in the mirror. I recently saw a photograph of myself at Lucy’s Halloween party, which I attended without a costume. Instead I showed up with a Malbec wrapped in an overpriced tea towel, thinking it was a housewarming party. Throw some jingle bells on me and call me the fool. 

In my defense, the apartment was new. Lucy is hardly stationary, but that doesn’t lessen her loyalty. I remember spending half the evening inspecting all of her carefully curated bric-a-brac, most of which had been in storage since she had left for grad school the year before we met. A wooden elephant. A scrap of paper with the words “why wait” scratched diagonally corner to corner in pencil. A miniature bouquet dried upside down. A men’s wristwatch with a crack across the glass face. 

Certainly all of this is quite meaningful to Lucy, but in that moment the unfamiliarity of her curios served to mark the distance growing between us. I’m shelling out $400 for red-eye flights to Boston for her bachelorette, and I can only guess at the significance of the broken candlestick patched with a Band-Aid that sits in a brass holder beside her bed, the wick never once lit. 

I know Lucy, though. Does she know me? Who does? No, she does. She was there that night on Colfax when the heel of my boot snapped off halfway back to her car after an open mic at The Squire. So many others, too. How was I to know that a middle-aged man in a Yankees cap was going to cover “Breath (2 a.m.)” It was so improbable and inappropriate, honestly. But who’s to say. I left crying, she followed. Clean break of the heel, she knelt in one swift step down to pick it up, and she kept following. She knew and didn’t have to ask, which made it worth so much more when, finally back in the refuge of her passenger seat, she did ask. Just as far in…

At the Halloween party, in a ceramic dish on the dresser housing movie ticket stubs and earrings, the boot heel was there. Relics of a real friend. I think men confuse me for a future I can give them. They behave like chemists, experimental. Pouring themselves out into a woman, confused when she is unwilling to allow her elements to mingle so haphazardly. Where are the archaeologists? Any future we have contingent on understanding the past.

How much of me exists in his idea of me? Or his feelings about his idea of me. A few taps on the screen and I can replay the voicemail he left the night before last: 

Ah, the machine again. That’s fine. I just was calling to say you don’t have to keep hiding. You’re scared, or whatever. I freaked you out. I’m sorry, you know. To make it weird. I hope you didn’t skip the birthday thing on my behalf. I do love you… No point hiding that either. 

A few more taps, and the synthetic ringback drones on the small phone speaker. No point hiding. As the third, the fourth ring runs out, I try to picture the breakup letter my first boyfriend left me in junior year. Lifetimes ago. I called mom to ask if she still had it, that bundle of papers tucked in a mod-podged cigar box. She didn’t answer either. 

Maybe we clutter our homes just to remember ourselves.

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