The takeout coffee he had bought for himself had long gone cold, but Aine left it sitting on the mantlepiece. She had nothing else of his in her home—not a stray sock, not a phone charger, not a scatter of coins on her bedside table.
She spent the morning since he left hoovering every room of hers he’s ever been in. When she was done, she took out the vacuum bag and took a scissors to the swell of it. The dust and hair and bits whooshed into a pile at the bottom of the shower, and she searched through it for some signs of him. A black curly hair or a stubby nail clipping. There was nothing. She picked it all up again with her bare hands and stuffed it in a plastic bag in the hopes indiscernible flakes of his skin were hidden within and would embed themselves into the cracks of her.
She had washed and changed the sheets since the last time he had been twisted up within them. There was no use searching for him there. He never stayed too long to imprint himself on her mattress.
This time he didn’t go near her bed or near her. He just stood in her living room like he owned the place and broke her heart again. In and out in 16 minutes. Record time. It is the quickest break up she had ever endured from him.
She wanted to ask if he thinks this woman will last. The one he’s leaving her for her. But he would have laughed, in that awkwardly polite way he does when he doesn’t want to sleep with her anymore, and say there is no leaving when they aren’t anything.
She wants to text him to tell him he’s left his coffee behind but it’s been seven hours. He’d probably show her text to this new woman, and say isn’t it lucky I met you? Isn’t it lucky I got away from this deluded bitch?
She puts her lips to the cup, where his rested to see if doing so reveals something of him to her. She handles it like it is something sacred and fills a freezer bag with its contents. In the winter she imagines she will make a soup out of it and serve it to him. She squashes the cup underneath her bare feet and lets the plastic top tear tiny scratches onto her soles. The remains of it she puts under her pillow in the hopes her dreams are full of them in love.
