Burning The Scrapbook

Fiction | Abandoning Love Turned Sour

My body is a scrapbook full of a collection of your affections. There was the kiss in 2022 that was so tender it barely registered on the page. You smelt of syrup and pancakes but tasted of the nervousness of a new lover testing the fit of their lips to another.

There was the kiss in the fall of that same year full of tongue, slow and eager, hungry for more. That page is full of kisses trailing from my mouth, the base of my neck, the supple skin above my breasts and the shy skin right beneath it. Those kisses were punctuated by my moans. They still echo on days when I flip through the pages.

I chew the memories over in the mouth of my mind. Swallow. My skin crawls at the bitterness that lingers in my mental mouth. It used to just be sweetness. You’ve ruined it. I’ve sat and accepted. I am ready now to scrape it into the garbage. Tear off the flesh that catalogues a lifetime of love, of tenderness, of sweet things now turned sour.

I have flipped back and forth. Traced my fingers along the brown valleys of these pages made of flesh. Retelling myself old stories, digging up old memories. I try to find the deviation from the joy there. I have been unsuccessful. You have been unhelpful.

I weep. You are somewhere probably too drunk to care. Probably buried face first the legs of another marking their pages in an attempt to erase the book we already made. My heart feels like it is in a cage on fire. My heart feels like it should be outside my body in a fridge. My brain knows this is temporary but my body, covered in imprints of what your love used to be, resists.

I tell myself books are temporary. I tell myself to rip out the pages; feed each memory to the fire. I wonder if I rub hard enough on my own flesh if I could start a fire. I laugh at the concept of self sabotage as a means to healing. Then I consider it. I consider it if it will stop the fucking pain. I move my hands to my stomach think of all the times you have glued butterflies here. I think of the warmth building building building there as you spoon me place I cherish you kisses on the back of my neck.

I almost get lost in those clippings but then I think of the feeling of my stomach dropping. Remember the dark emptiness that unfurled there, slowly at first and then with a rapid certainty that you no longer loved me. It is funny how I have flipped and flipped through the memories and still can’t pinpoint the exact moment. What is the point of such obsessive record keeping if it is not a roadmap not just to the past but to tracing the failures.

I have to start speaking in past tense now. I pinch the skin between my thumb and forefinger. Tell myself it was not my fault. Tell myself there will be no reconciliation, or forgiveness, or moving past the time wasted no matter how sweet it was. Scrape my nails up and down my palm. I am writing a new story. My body will be mine again; a collection of my own affection.

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