Larissa

I still have all her shit – her toothbrush, a Grow-Your-Own-Mushrooms kit that she actually purchased at Whole Foods and the hair-wrap that a wandering street hippie gave her in Indonesia which she promptly cut off upon returning to the States. It still has little pieces of her tangerine hair sticking out of it in all directions. I am repulsed.

Our breakup was surprisingly normal compared to our relationship, a mutual agreement that things “just weren’t working out,” though I can’t help feel that somehow they could have, if she had wanted them to. But she never asked for anyone’s permission, especially not mine. She was the type to steal an entire steak sandwich right off your plate if she decided that she liked yours better. It didn’t matter that everyone around us was staring, judging. And when she bit down on that greasy sirloin it made you want to personally lick off the mustard bouncing on the side of her cheek.

She was the life of the party, without even showing up. Her erratic antics and drunken faux-pauxs provided the people who knew her with hours of entertainment from gossiping alone. Someone always needed to be filled-in on the latest. However, one could not help but suspect that the silences in between the uproarious laughter were filled with the fledgling desire of wishing they had the nerve be as ridiculous as she was.

She was a fabulous liar—like Holden Caulfield, on cocaine. She could hold you in bug-eyed rapture listening to one of her tales you knew was neither fact nor fiction, but the carefully woven lovechild of both. Truths so beautifully enshrined in falsities that you wouldn’t even recognize them if you bumped into them on the street. And the scary thing was, you didn’t care.

And when she left, she was gone, leaving only the things that you wanted least from the relationship such as the germ-infested toothbrush, the unmanned, putrid fungus operation that was beginning to take over the entire kitchen and the abominable hair-wrap with her goddamn hair STILL clinging onto it...

...and as I carefully pinch each of these items into a giant trash bag, along with the three vodka bottles I have gone through this week, I am careful to include the regret I harbor from no longer being with her. I feel I am finally ridding myself of the Vulcan death grip she held on my life, body, spirit and mind. I feel almost as though I could levitate knowing that as soon as that garbage truck’s incessant wailing permeates my sleep at some ungodly hour and dumps all this trash into it’s massive caboose via mechanical forklift, as soon as it’s front wheels grind against the asphalt and away from my apartment, as soon as its tail lights blend into the endless flow of traffic and eventually disappear – So. Will. Larissa.