Parting Gifts

Before he left he gave me five boxes. Then he left. Five boxes; one for each sense. He was a shit like that. Before I left, I opened them. He bought me perfume, he hated the one I wore, he wanted me to smell like he imagined. I never smelt like he imagined, but he imagined I did. For taste he bought me an interior design catalogue because he said I had none. Arrogance was one of his better qualities. He gave me a photo of himself so I could remember what he looked like. Every time we were apart I forgot. I confused him with someone else I used to know. He didn’t like that. He carried a photo of me, even though it looked nothing like I did. It was much prettier than I really was, even then. He was so proud of that picture, taken from that strange angle in that strange light, he showed it to his friends and they patted him on the back and bought him drinks. I don’t look like that! I never did, not even once! In the fourth box was a telephone number, to call in case I wanted to hear him, to listen to his breath at the end of the receiver, separated by static and distorted into ones and zeros. I set fire to that number, even though I knew it off by heart, I set fire to it, and listened as it sputtered and crackled. That sound was more satisfying than a thousand hours of our long gone late-night whispers. Finally he gave me a bar mat. I looked at it. I flipped it over in my fingers, played with it, and failed to remember. When it came back to me it came slowly, like a lizard crawling up my chest. It was the bar mat my fingers rested on the first time our hands met, the first time his warm skin met mine. I felt dizzy, and a little bit sick. And at that moment I wished I wasn’t there.