But if you'd known how that would sound to me, you would've taken it back and boxed it up and buried it in the ground.

Talking to Queen Frostine one morning late last week (as I do almost every week day, on my way to work), I relayed a conversation I’d had with Fluffernutter the day before. I told her how I hadn’t cried about the break-up with Rango since the first days. I was feeling more centered and more at peace with everything, if sad and resigned at times.

“You’re handling this break-up so much better,” she agreed. “I’m really proud of you.”

I told Pandy that, again, I felt like I was reliving events of five years prior, ending my relationship. The similarities were eerie at times. Certainly, I am prone to attract avoidant attachers, usually dismissives, and Rango was no exception. But there hadn’t been the self-recrimination and second-guessing that I’d experienced before. I had avoided the prolonged bouts of melancholy that followed in the wake of Bounder. I chalked it up to having done much of my work in those five years, coming to terms with myself. I’d also had a year or more to live preemptively through the grief of losing Rango.

But he came on Saturday to get his belongings. I’d packed everything neatly, wrapping his glasses in paper and putting a figurine we’d gotten him for Christmas back in its Styrofoam sarcophagus. Some of the boxes were labeled, and I’d stacked them neatly in the carport, away from the edge where the rains of Hurricane Irma might blow onto them.

I heard his car drive up, and I was okay initially. But when I glanced out the kitchen window, peeking from a distance through a space in the curtains, I saw him. There was the man I loved, from whom I’d been separated physically for nearly a month.

I lost my shit.

I immediately hurried back to the bedroom, far enough away that I wouldn’t have to hear him load his boxes and talk to the friend who’d come with him to help. I messaged the Castration Committee that I was sobbing uncontrollably, that it must be Snoturday.

My girls were sweet and messaged with me constantly throughout the afternoon. They reminded me of all the ways in which they see me as wonderful, as well as all the ways in which they see him as an ass. 

But for a moment, none of that mattered. I wanted nothing more than to fling open the front door and run to him, to feel his arms around me and his breath in my hair. I had the fleeting argument with myself over whether I could do it, trying to convince my anger that its sister, aching, would be relieved if only I could hold him for a moment.

It was the bargaining stage of grief, in the Kubler Ross and Kessler model.

I’d avoided it until that moment, at least since I’d officially called it quits. In practice, I’d been bargaining with him for months, trying to abate my grief at what I saw coming. I’d vacillated between denial and anger and that negotiating, trying desperately to convince him to meet me on some middle ground, to love me and to let me love him back.

The last of a 24-hour-long fight over email ensued, plus a final phone call from him asking about where something was (packed neatly just as I’d said in email). Hearing his voice after hours of crying was a sucker punch to the gut. I shouldn’t have taken the call. Not being able to tell him that I love him made me want to vomit.

Pandy suggested this morning that I find my anger again. I don’t want to be angry. That takes too much energy to maintain. I understand her point, though. If I can feel not so sentimental about him, then it will hurt less.

But it’s going to hurt as long as it hurts. For me to feel nothing after a month, in the aftermath of a three-year relationship, would be unhealthy in its own way. I never wanted this break-up. I wanted to fulfill those promises of the rest our lives. It will take time to find peace in the acceptance of what we lost.

For years, I had a sign in my bedroom that says Forever And Always And No Matter What. I hung it on the wall across from the bed when DH and I were married. He took it down in those last months, but I put it back when he left. It was, and is, an important vow exchanged regularly between me and my sons.

We took it down again last summer to paint the bedroom. Rango never got around the hanging it again. I did it this week, while I was home with the boys during Irma. It’s the first thing I see when I wake in the morning.

But Rango had also  bought a sister sign, in the same style, that said HAPPILY EVER AFTER. He’d intended to hang it with the other one, just for us. It never made it to the wall.

I put it in the pile with his boxes. He left it to the side, and for two more days I will see it sticking out of the trash can until the garbage man comes to take it away.

I kept lots of reminders of him. I kept the blue canary nightlight and the book end he bought me for my first birthday with him. I kept the charms for my bracelet that he bought with the boys. I kept the sound machine he bought me for Mother’s Day, to soothe me with rain sounds when I can’t sleep.

But I could not keep the things that would hurt in the coming weeks and months. I couldn’t keep the metal Rango he also bought me for Mother’s Day. I couldn’t keep the house key he returned yesterday.

Those things are all packed away in a box I bought especially for him. In the back corner of my closet, where I don’t have to see it every day, my life with Rango sits in the dark. If I were to get it out and go through it, I’m sure I’d cry.

But I can do that on my own right now. I don’t need his box.