Congratulations on Finding The Dress She Left!

It’ll be there in the bottom of her dresser when you’re cleaning out her room. This will be the fourth or fifth time you’ve tried; you usually have to stop about halfway through. It’s hard for you to be in there, in the room you both used to sleep in, with all your memories of her. This time, it’ll be even harder.

She’ll have been gone two weeks when you find it. You’ll have been sleeping on the futon for one, after you realized that you just couldn’t still your thoughts wrapped in sheets that still held her scent and a mattress that still had her imprint. You’ll still just be sleeping in a sleeping bag, like a kid at a sleepover party.

Except unlike a kid at a sleepover party you’ll be chain smoking cigarettes and drinking Jack Daniels out of the bottle while you try to stop weeping. But you will be like a kid at a sleepover party in that you’ll sleep in your clothes and won’t change them when you get up the next day, at least most of the time.

When you find the dress tears will well in your eyes without you knowing it. After a moment, you’ll realize what you’re looking at.

It’ll be the floral print dress, the white one with little red roses on it. It’ll be the one she knew was your favorite, the one that she’d sit on your lap in and kiss you and kiss you until she could feel you hard underneath her, and then she’d give you one last innocent kiss and walk into the bedroom and you’d follow.

You’ll sniff the dress to see if it still holds any of her scent, but it’ll just smell like Ikea teak, just like everything else in the dresser.

You’ll consider sending her an email to let her know you found it, maybe an email where you tell her about the hard time you’ve been having. You turn on your computer and open up the mail client and type in her address, but you won’t be able to think of anything to say.

Press send anyway. Give the dress to Goodwill. Let it make someone else happy. Congratulations on finding it. Things are going to get better for you real soon.