It sits in the corner where he used to sit, pulling me towards it daily. I draw the curtains back from the window seat alcove in our bedroom, my bedroom, and curl up next to the package. He had mailed it to me about a week before he died, two hundred and thirty three days ago.

I could never bring myself to take a scissor and tear through the tape he’d wrapped around the brown box, and I’d grown accustomed to its spot on the satin blue cushion. Brown and blue looked so nice together.

They had been our colors.

That sounds funny, a couple having a set of colors, but it became true across the span of our two-year-although-it-felt-like-all-our-lives relationship. Tiny instances of the colors always conjured themselves. This was after they became our favorite colors. Mine blue, his brown. I remembered questioning him, in disgust. Brown as in the color of poop?

Brown as in the color of the earth we first camped on. Brown as in the tree bark our initials are carved into. Brown as in your hair, your eyes, your skin.

My reasons in retrospect are far less romantic. Blue as in not pink. I’d been oddly defiant of gender roles since day one.

The brown package on the blue satin called to my soul. I reached out the fingers that used to interlock with his, but for the two hundredth and thirty third time, I stopped short of it’s roughed edges that the rain had worn the night before I’d received it. The world had cried with me at the loss of Alex.

I’d spent enough time psychoanalyzing myself to know my reasons. Learning about him would be over once it was opened, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. So I let my unhealthy obsession continue. Maybe tomorrow, I’d touch it.
And I did. I touched it and I cried I opened it and I cried I held the journal he had left me and I cried and I cried and I cried. I felt a sweet relief, realizing I’d finally be given an answer as to why he’d left me on this now too empty earth.

I also felt a hollow moan in my chest, understanding the grieving process was just about to begin. Opening the package was not the end, it was the beginning. I was ready.

KAILEY NELSON was born in Singapore, raised in Shanghai and is currently residing in the United States earning her Bachelors Degree. An aspiring writer, Kailey has a passion for poetry and short stories. She can always be found with a pen in her hand and a love for travel in her eyes, searching for the unfamiliar.