Exeunt, by Sarah Kaljian

In the morning, the sun rose, but he was long gone. 

There were no long-winded goodbyes or secret love letters, not like in the movies. 

Instead, there was a gaping hole. A clean tear, like a hole punch straight through my soul. The clean ones were always the hardest to heal.

He left behind a few things—his hair gel in the cabinet, a couple of forgotten socks in the laundry basket. But there was much more than that. 

The towels he had folded were still in the bathroom, piled neatly on top of our silver shelves. The lemon air freshener he bought me was still dangling on the mirror in my car—it was my favorite scent, and he had purchased it for that reason.

Even the eggs he had bought us brought up memories of home-cooked breakfast; mornings spent talking over coffee, eggs, and bacon. Breakfast was his favorite meal. Mine, too, because he had always made it feel so special.

Not anymore. 

The eggs went first, smashed into a trash bag he picked up from the grocery store down the street.

Next, the gray bedsheets we bought on a bright Saturday morning. I ripped them off of the mattress, left it naked and vulnerable. 

A phone call to my boss to quit my job, one he had desperately wanted me to get, followed. 

My hair went next, the long locks he tangled his fingers in gone with a few strokes of my scissors. My blue blouse, the one he said brought out my eyes, suffered the same fate. 

Piece by piece, I broke down the wall he had built around me; let it settle into the carpet his toes dug into for years. 

 

Grief isn’t like the movies, either. Neither is heartbreak. It is methodical destruction for the sake of coming to terms with the trauma, bitter tears to combat the sentimental ones. 

For days, I didn’t dare let the sun intrude. Inviting in the same radiance that would bring light to his perfection as mercilessly as it would highlight my shortcomings felt traitorous. 

Until, upon waking one morning to a mascara-stained mattress, the sun began to invade. It peered into the room, creeping in, inch by inch. 

It wouldn’t succeed on its own terms. I stormed at the perpetrator, a handful of my choppy hair clenched in my fist. The shade tumbled down. 

And that morning, as the sun rose, I was there to greet it.