I’m a hoarder of emotionally significant artifacts from dead relationships

Allow me to set the scene. It’s the morning after I hooked up with a sort-of-ex who destroyed me emotionally a few months ago, because I always like to touch a hot stove at least two or three times to make sure it’s still a bad idea. We’re eating BECs on everything bagels in his no-frills boy kitchen, just like old times, when I gesture toward a suspiciously blank spot on his fridge that kind of makes my stomach drop and say, “Did you throw out the birthday card I got you?”

“Yeah. I feel like holding onto that stuff makes you live in the past,” he says, like someone who wasn’t literally just inside of his ex-something-or-other less than an hour earlier.

“Oh,” I say, exactly like someone who still has a Ziploc baggie of pretzels he once packed for me to take on the Amtrak sitting in a drawer back at my apartment would.

Clearly, this man and I have very different ideas about what to do with the relationship rubble that’s left over after a love story comes to an end—the gifts, trinkets, and other bits of physical evidence that what’s over now did, in fact, happen. To me, holding onto these things is not about living in the past; it’s about honoring it, or at least acknowledging it, rather than simply discarding it. I still have letters, jewelry, sweatshirts, and yes, stale pretzels from long-lost lovers I’ve long since gotten over, and I’m glad I do. Unfortunately, according to a brief internet search, there’s a name for this, and that name is “sentimental hoarding.” Oops.

But what are you supposed to do with these emotionally charged artifacts—the physical relics that remain after the numbers have been blocked and the memories start to fade? Do you throw them out? Burn them? Pawn them for cash? Hide them from yourself in a box at your parents’ place?

Indeed, in a drawer in my childhood bedroom, you’ll find a graveyard—or treasure trove, depending on how you look at it—of these once-enchanted, now-haunted objects. A purple jar candle a high school boyfriend once picked up for me at a roadside shop and the black V-neck T-shirt I was wearing in the backseat of his car the first (and last) time we had sex, shortly before he gave me baby’s first real smack upside the heart. The bracelet a college ex presented, unwrapped, as a Christmas gift even though I knew we were about to break up for the second and final time and I kind of wished he’d given me nothing at all. (I was single by the new year.) Two pieces of paper with his boy-scrawl handwriting on them, crumpled up and torn in half but never actually thrown away.

In a Midtown bar some weeks before The Birthday Card Incident and mere days after the initial heartbreak that precipitated it, I asked yet another ghost of situationships past whether he still has the only gift I’d ever given him: a pig-shaped corkscrew I’d been unable to stop myself from buying for him at a bookstore in Brooklyn five years ago and was terrified to actually give to him lest I seem too eager or interested or absolutely beside myself in love with him. (Reader, I was all of these things.)

“Of course I do!” he said in a way that made me believe he was surprised I’d ask. “I thought you were just going to ask whether I still like pigs.”

I smiled quietly and blushed down at my drink, not mentioning the uneaten box of chocolates I still have sitting on my dresser—the only thing he ever gave me.

A few days later, still desperate for some proof that I’d survived heartbreak before and would, in all likelihood, do so again this time, I dug out another old letter from my college ex. This one is still intact, scrawled beneath Air Force Academy letterhead. I sent him a photo of it, writing, “Hey, someone broke my stupid heart again so I’ve been revisiting old heartbreaks to try to find a way to make this one make sense and I came across this.”

Turns out he’s held onto some of our relationship rubble himself: a duck-shaped bar of soap (don’t ask) I’d included in one of the care packages I used to send him in his military academy days (yes, friends, the rumors are true—even I had a wifey era) and my personal copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, inscribed with a note I’d penned across the dedication page. I’d given it to him as a parting gift early in our relationship, when we were about to go long distance and neither of us knew what, exactly, that was going to mean.

In case you missed that one in AP Lit, allow me to refresh your memory. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a book about the WWII bombing of Dresden and also aliens. Tralfamadorians, to be specific. And the most important thing protagonist Billy Pilgrim learns during his visit to Tralfamador is, per the novel, “that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” For the Tralfamadorians, time isn’t linear: “It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

Back in my ex-situationship’s kitchen with the birthday-card-less fridge, I want to explain all of this to him—about the Tralfamadorians and non-linear time and how people don’t simply vanish from your life just because you’ve stopped loving them or they’ve stopped loving you or you still love each other but, as he said to me on his couch the night before, “sometimes love isn’t enough.” About how you can’t just throw people and what they’ve meant to you away, even if you want to. About how I’m not living in the past; the past is alive in me.

But I don’t tell him about any of this. I don’t say, “Actually, these fictional aliens invented by a traumatized WWII veteran mean that you still love me—admit it!” Instead, I eat my egg sandwich. I fidget with a drawer on the side of his kitchen table. I laugh it off. I don’t say much of anything.

“Anyway,” I later texted my college ex, “I just wanted to say that you were right and braver than I was for ending things when you did.” In case you can’t tell, I’ve never been any good at endings.