A week after he tells her, he takes the last box out of the trunk of his car. It's small, light, but somehow doesn't feel so as he climbs the two flights of stairs to his new white-walled apartment. The box isn't labeled, but he can recite the contents by heart: doodles on sticky notes that came attached to faxes, three black paper circles, memos with inside jokes written in the margins, a receipt for drugstore perfume and an obscene number of instant noodle cups, a handful of Polaroids, a single blue poker chip, an unopened Christmas card.
For the briefest of moments he thinks of throwing the box off his new balcony, or running down the stairs and across town to the waterfront and tossing it straight into the Long Island Sound. But that would be too rash, too sudden. No, the only way was to put what he can in a nameless box, store it away in the back of his white-walled closet in his white-walled apartment, and hope he forgets. Maybe someday he will open this box and not be able to remember what it all meant.
If only he could put everything in the box. Put in the slightly fruity taste of her lipgloss, the tickling of her fingers on his neck briefly but deliberately pulling him closer, the feeling of her curves pressed against his chest. If only he could forget the hands so small and warm in his, the slight smile when she admitted she had wanted to kiss him too, the nod when he asked if she was still getting married to someone else, the eyes shifting so fast from hope and maybe even love back to fear and confusion.
If only it was possible, he thinks, to forget it all.
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