There is a box-- it's late, and I want you to know this. There is a box, a cardboard box, sealed behind a panel in the drawers built into the wall of my old apartment. Its contents are the wholly unremarkable remnants of a relationship so miserably failed I could no longer bear to keep them: small love notes, the original piece of paper where she wrote her e-mail address the night we first met, a string of black and white pictures from a photo booth in an ice cream parlor, the key card from the hotel room where we spent our one and only weekend away together (I was particularly touched that she had kept it, when she presented it to me several weeks later, as I left for a trip). I think that it's still there. It may have fallen over, from its somewhat precarious perch on a supporting beam, into one of the functioning drawers below. It may have been discovered and removed when the apartment was cleaned (and did someone look through this sad holdover I couldn't bring myself to throw out?).

Why didn't I just toss it? I was about too, but a friend I spoke to about it told me that he could never bear to do throw such things away. He kept all the old shoeboxes of memories (do we all use shoeboxes, or just us former runners?) stored away for infrequent strolls down memory lane. He strongly suggested that I do same. I didn't want to keep it, but found I couldn't throw it out either. These objects sometimes seem to take on a life of their own when they're all that's leftover, from something shared between two people, so big it seemed itself to be a living, breathing thing. Throwing it out would have felt, in some way, like killing my own offspring, so, like a cowardly, junkie mother leaving her illegitimate child in a garbage can, I put it out of sight do be discovered much later and made somebody else's problem.

It shames me to admit this, but part of me got a little thrill over the idea of someone she knows finding this evidence and blowing the top off the whole affair. I hope, though, that it sits there for quite some time and, eventually, when the building is remodeled or demolished, it will be found, sifted through with mild curiosity, then discarded when it's found to contain nothing juicy and nothing of value to anyone but me. Perhaps its discoverer will dream that night of the smiling, freckled, blond woman in the photograph, eyes closed as she leans her head back into the crook of her lover's neck, his hand in her hair.