Sentimentality

Sentimentality

He was never one for sentimentality, he simply wasn't. I was never too bothered by this fact. He's pretty forgetful too, that's just how he is. See I'm never really bothered by anything that makes him who he is. Perhaps I'll get momentarily annoyed, but that's all.

Sometimes he'll remember something, if it's big, like my birthday. He likes simplicity. Last year he got me a very large stuffed lion. I named it Rodregio after the Shakespeare character and I still sleep with it. This year I woke up with a small cardboard box on my chest. This was an incredible amount of planning for him so already I was intrigued.

There was a skeleton key inside, large and heavy, iron maybe. I lifted it out of the box. It hung on a silver chain and I twirled it between my fingers.

I found him sitting at the table, eating his cereal in that weird ways he gets when he's embarrassed or nervous. It's cute.

"What's this," I asked him, holding up the key. He shrugs.

"It opens a box in the attic... but you can't open it now. You have to wait."

"Until when?"

He shrugged again and I slipped the chain around my neck. I wore it pretty much all the time, save for when we had sex, it would get in the way. Other than that, I always had it on.

So now I'm up in the attic, on my knees. He's dead. I figured it was a good time to open the box. I feed the key into the lock and turn. The tiny wood lid opens easy and there, on a pad a velvet, is a dried rose, fragile and sad looking. There was a thin metal ring tied to the steam.