“Do you still love me?”
What the fuck kind of question is that coming from an ex-boyfriend I haven’t talked to in months?
“I did,” I say calmly, emphasizing the past tense. “Very much.”
It actually started with a fish.
I’ve found, over the course of the summer, a few things of E’s that I missed in the collecting and returning of his stuff. A waterbottle. A can cozy. Dumb things he wouldn’t miss and that I didn’t care to have around the house. So I tossed them in the trash. But a few weeks ago, I found the fish and I knew he would want that. I couldn’t just throw it away.
The fish-shaped dish is a souvenir of a trip he took to Mexico with his mom when he was a kid. He always kept it on the coffee table, using it as the occasional ashtray, change holder, key catcher, drop box for whatever came out of his pockets. It was painted with bright stripes and looked vaguely cartoonish. It reminded him of when things were good with his mom, before she got sick. He loved it.
Last spring his drunkass brother knocked the thing over and part of its tail broke off. E was raging pissed, and we gathered up the pieces to repair it with the superglue I had at my house. I fitted the pieces back together and tucked it into a drawer to keep my curious cat away from the glue while it dried.
We both forgot it was there, and then we broke up. And when I found it I knew what I had to do.
