Why We Broke Up

"Dear ____,
In a sec you'll hear a thunk. At your back door, the one nobody uses. It'll rattle the hinges a bit when it lands, because it's so weighty and important, a little jangle along with the thunk, and your mom will look up from whatever she's cooking. She will look down in her saucepan, worried that if she goes to see what it is it'll boil over. I can see her frown in the reflection of the bubbly sauce. But she'll go, she'll go and see. You won't. You wouldn't. You're upstairs, probably, sweaty and heartbroken. I hope. So it's your mother who will open the door even though the thunk's for you. You won't even know or hear what's being dumped at your door. You won't even know why it even happened.

 It's a beautiful day, sunny and whatnot. The sort of day when you think everything will be all right. Not the right day for this, not for us, who went out when it rained, from october 5 until november 12. But the sky is bright and it's clear to me. I'm telling you why we broke up.
I'm writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much.

 The thunk is the box. This is what I am leaving you. I found it down in the basement, just grabbed the box when all our things were too much for my bedside drawer. So it all went into the box and the box went into my closet with some shoes on top of it that I never wear. Every last souvenir of the love we had, the prizes and the debris of this relationship, like the glitter in the gutter when the parade had passed; all the everything kicked to the curb. I'm dumping the whole box back into your life, every item of you and me. I'm dumping this box on your porch, but it is you who is getting dumped.

 The thunk, I admit it, will make me smile, a rare thing lately. Lately, I've been like Aimeé Rondelé in The Sky Cries Too, a movie, French, you haven't seen. She plays an assassin and dress designer, and she only smiles twice in the whole film. Once is when the kingpin who killed her father gets thrown off a building, which is not the time I'm thinking of. It's the time at the end, when she finally has the envelope of photographs and burns it unopened in a gorgeous ashtray and she knows it is over and lights a cigarette and stands in her perfect green of a dress, watching the blackbirds swarm and flurry around the church spire. I can see it. The world is right again, is the smile. I love you, and now here's back your stuff, out of my life like you belong, is the smile. I know you can't see it. Not you, but maybe if I tell you the whole plot, you'll understand it just this once, because even now I want you to see it. I don't love you anymore, of course I don't, but still there's something I can show you. You know I want to be a screenwriter, but you could never truly see the movies in my head, and that is why we broke up."