Chapter 1 of The Rewrite
The box had been sitting in the corner of my living room for weeks. For a long time, I pretended it was not there. It was not hidden in a closet or pushed under the bed. It sat right in the open, next to the radiator. It was a cardboard box sealed with tape. My ex-boyfriend’s name was written on the side in thick, black marker. The box looked at me like a stray dog that no one wanted to take home. Still, I could not bring myself to throw it away.
Every morning, I stepped over the box on my way to work. Every night, I walked past it to get to the couch while holding my dinner and the TV remote. Sometimes, I caught myself staring at it during commercials. I looked at it the way someone looks at a spider in the corner of a room. I was too afraid to hit it, but too uncomfortable to let it stay.
I told myself I would throw it out tomorrow. Tomorrow, I would carry it down three flights of stairs. Tomorrow, I would put it on the curb with the trash. Tomorrow, I would erase the last memory of him. But tomorrow always turned into another today.
Maybe I kept the box because throwing it away meant admitting the relationship was really over. It wasn't just about the mean fights or the way he betrayed me. It was about the long, messy time we spent together. Yes, he cheated on me. He lied to me. He turned out to be a very cruel person. I should have seen it coming. But throwing away the box felt like deleting a whole chapter of my life. I didn't want to feel like none of it mattered.
Tonight, I finally had enough. I had not slept well in weeks and I had drank a bit too much wine. I decided to open the box.
It was almost midnight when I dragged the cardboard cube into the middle of the living room floor. I pulled the tape off. It made a long, hissing sound, as if the box wanted to stay closed. I expected to find normal things from a breakup. I thought there would be old hoodies, dirty socks, or maybe a phone charger he forgot. Just junk.
That is what I found at first.
I pulled out a wrinkled sweatshirt. It still smelled a little bit like his cologne. I found a cracked iPhone charger. I found a baseball hat for a team he didn't even like. I pulled these things out one by one. I felt very cold and distant, like a doctor removing something bad from a body. My chest felt tight, but I did not stop.
At the very bottom of the box, I found something different. It was a stack of Polaroid photos. They were tied together with a piece of thin string.
I stopped moving. We were never the kind of couple that took many photos. He never wanted to take pictures with me. He always said that being romantic and "sappy" was annoying. The only pictures I remembered were blurry ones on my phone. We usually had fake smiles in those. But here was a neat bundle of instant photos, waiting for me to look at them.
My fingers were shaking as I untied the string. The first photo almost made me smile. It showed him and me together on a beach. We were both grinning at the camera. My hair was messy from the wind and my eyes were squinting because the sun was so bright. His arm was around my shoulders. He looked like he owned me.
But then I realized something. We had never gone to the beach together. Not one single time.
I stared at the photo. I tried to remember if we had ever taken a trip like that. I thought maybe the photo was taken before we met, but I was in the picture. The girl in the photo was definitely me. I was laughing. My skin looked tan from the sun. My hair was a little longer than it is now. I was wearing a blue bikini. It was the exact shade of blue I liked, but I had never owned a swimsuit like that in my life.
I looked at the second photo. It showed us standing in front of a bright Christmas tree. The ornaments were shining. He was wearing a silly red sweater. I was wearing a matching green sweater with reindeer on it. we were laughing and holding mugs of hot cocoa. I could see marshmallows floating on top.
We never spent Christmas together.
During our first year, he went home to see his family. The second year, he said he had too much work to do. By the third year, our relationship was falling apart. I had never worn that green sweater. I had never decorated that tree. It never happened.
The next few photos were even stranger. They showed moments that felt familiar but also totally wrong. There was a photo of a dinner at a fancy restaurant with candles. I did not recognize the place. There was a photo of a picnic in a park, but it wasn't a park in our city. There were photos of vacations, anniversaries, and birthdays that never took place.
I started flipping through the photos faster and faster. My stomach felt sick. On the back of every photo, there was a date. It was written in his messy handwriting. 2016. 2017. 2018.
These dates were years before we even met.
I should have stopped looking. I should have put everything back in the box and taped it shut forever. But I couldn't stop myself.
The last photo fell out of the stack.
It was a picture of me. I stopped breathing for a second. In this photo, I wasn't smiling or posing for a camera. I was asleep. My face was relaxed and my mouth was slightly open. My hair was spread out across the pillow. I could see the lamp next to my bed glowing softly. I recognized my own sheets and my own bedroom.
I turned the photo over. The date on the back said: Yesterday.
The photo slipped out of my hands and landed on the carpet.
I sat there, frozen. A cold, tingling feeling went up my neck and across my chest. My apartment felt way too quiet. I looked toward the windows. I could see the reflection of my living room in the dark glass.
That was when I heard it. A small, sharp click. It sounded exactly like the shutter of a camera.
I turned around quickly. My heart was pounding against my ribs. The sound had come from outside, on the fire escape. I moved closer to the window and looked out into the dark. My breath made a fog on the glass.
In the reflection of the window, I saw her. For just one second, I saw a woman standing outside. She was watching me.
The woman looked exactly like me.
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