Hannah

My girlfriend gave me junk for Christmas. Maybe it’s not actually junk, but I can’t figure it out, so it’s junk to me. It’s a block of wood, rounded on each end, maybe five inches across. The top is divided in two, and each half hinges on a screw. It’s not hollow, though. You can’t keep anything in it. You can’t do anything with it, as far as I can tell. Someone, probably the same whacked-out soul who thought this was an intelligent use of wood, wrote “Rs 5/” in pencil across the bottom, which is basically Greek to me. I have no idea what Kelly was thinking.
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Christmas was three months ago. The trees are budding, the bravest of the flowers are opening up, and every few days or so, the temperature tops 60˚. Kelly loves this time of year. She finds every excuse to be outdoors, whether she’s alone on her bike or breaking out the picnic basket with a bunch of friends. My allergies try to kill me every spring, so I’m never quite as happy as she is, but I do enjoy seeing real sunlight and grass that’s green again. Everything’s a little greyer this year, though, without Kelly’s auburn hair adding color everywhere I go. She left last week.
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I’d like to say I don’t know where I went wrong, play the martyr role, but I know it’s not true. I know exactly where I went wrong. Where we went wrong, I should say. I’m a firm believer in “it takes two to tango.” We both had our expectations. Life with her was a constant adventure. She always had a museum or a graveyard or a neighboring town she wanted to wander around for the day, and she had a list of at least fifteen countries she wanted to see in person before she turned fifty. Problem was, she wanted me to be an adventure, too, and I’m much more of a nine-to-five, picket fence kind of guy. I was happy to stroll along the river’s edge for a day and eat at a new restaurant from time to time, but it’s hard for me to even picture jetting to Norway at a moment’s notice, let alone actually doing it. I wanted to make her my wife, but she was already married to her imagination.
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Kelly always said my apartment could be the picture in the dictionary next to the word “austere.” That’s not quite fair, but I’m not a pack rat by any stretch of the imagination. But now that Kelly’s gone, I wish I’d kept more stuff from the past year. She kept buying me trinkets from the towns we visited, even though she knew damn well I hate trinkets. I gave them away. Some I gave to my sister, who loves that sort of thing. She might give them back, but I also hate to ask. I can already hear her saying “I told you so,” because she tried to get me to keep them. But I’ll have to ask, because I can’t stand the thought that all I have left is a couple of photographs and this god-forsaken, useless, maddening, unknowable wooden thing.