He has left me.
I am good at being broken. I weep. I am hugged by my friends. I dissect his then my then bitch her star signs (I don't believe in horoscopes). My heart drips pus. Berebescu.
And then, the lowest of the low, the most shameful, most out of character: I ask Dear Aunty Internet for advice.
Suggestions and soapy web warmth are immediate. I must talk to my friends. Start an evening class. Take up a hobby! Take up drugs and overdose on his doorstep. And then, a comment by a name I recognise, one of the bosom-clutching 'you guys are so sweet' chthonic purveyors of my excruciation: I must get rid of everything that reminds me of him.
Everything that reminds me of you.
The dustbin lorry comes every Thursday morning, at an hour painful to the hungover. Its grumble rumble stop grumble rumble stop alice-in-wonderlands me, so I hear again my dad proclaiming in theatrical tones 'the DUSTBIN DRAGON is here' as he crouched with me to peer through the letter box at the monster tearing apart the rubbish bags. My Thursday dragon still has the same strong teeth, which clamp and empty the 52-gallon wheelie bins - I read somewhere that 'dustman' charts in the top 10 of jobs earning amputated limbs: the monster gets peckish. Such jaws are surely strong enough to crunch through the things that remind me of you. I plan my destruction. I tell all my friends. They approve: this is healthy.
On the Wednesday night I ceremoniously parade forthback from my flat to the bin by the broken-down fence in the front garden, heaping up the history of us. A half-finished packet of fags (you only smoke when you're drunk). The underwear in which you loved me best: blue silk, and I have to belly bend and throw up at the lustflash of the first time you saw me in it, your softsharp intake of breath, how your eyes fucked me, as you plucked a loose strand and put it in your pocket, 'to analyse later, like in a crime scene'. One of your pens (you always use the same kind). The sheets in which we slept cat-curled and silk stroken. The chart you scrawled me to prove that man really did land on the moon.
I sit on the broken fence and survey the pile. Small; insubstantial; meaningless. Everything every thing an echo. It is cold but I stay sitting, one shoe kicked off, black clothes hanging loose, waiting.
As dawn blots (late, it is winter) I pack everything in the bin, carefully compacting and pushing everything down until something plastic snaps. I swing the lid shut. All our love measures little more than six inches high: there is still plenty of room in the bin.
I hear the brumble of the lorry and it turns the corner in the half dark, stopping outside the big house. Shadows push a bin funereally forward; the dragon's mouth gapes; it clamps pig hard on the plastic and gulps back its contents into the grinding depths. I hear crunched metal masticated as it spits the bin back to earth.
I think of you, of us. I see the way you looked at me. I smell the side of your neck, and taste it on my tongue's tip. I feel your fingers stroketracing the curve of my waist. I think of every thing.
Then I open the bin and climb inside. There is plenty of room. I pull the lid shut over me and wait.
