dear lover, please let me throw away your notebooks.

i still haven’t fully unpacked since i moved. i find myself searching that room for things quite often.

each time i look, i find pieces of her. not because i search them out, but simply because you have held on to so many of them.

when i first moved in, i went looking for paper. i saw notebooks and was grateful you had so many, there was bound to be one with empty pages in it.

unfortunately, the ones i picked up were full. i must have gone through each one until i got to the middle of the row, where there was finally an empty one.

as i flipped through the first half, i caught sight of her name, over and over. my eyes lingered too long on some pages, full of love notes and details of weekends spent together.

i felt queasy. i ripped my blank paper out to write you a note before i went to work and shut the door.

when we cleaned it together, you wouldn’t let me throw her pieces away. not the pictures, not the notes. we went down the entire row, book after book, and as i went to throw them away, you held onto them.

i wonder why. i don’t understand why you would want to keep pieces of someone who was so unwilling to make you a proud part of their life. even i don’t hold onto the pieces i could have kept of my first love.

my most recent search in the room was for a game case, one i wasn’t able to find anywhere outside of the piles of boxes. look through them, you said. that’s where it’s got to be.

so i looked.

there’s so many more pieces than i thought. looseleaf papers burried in the bottom of boxes, full of her name, of more weekends, of professions of love.

once again, i felt sick.

there’s just so many, it’s overwhelming. i figure it must be hard to throw away almost a decade of being with someone, but it makes me want to retreat into myself knowing that as your partner, i will spend a lifetime with you, surrounded by pieces of her you’re unwilling to let go of.

when we move into a bigger place so that we have enough room to start our growing family, i want to be the one to toss those notebooks into the trashcan.

i still haven’t found the case.