1:14am and I was on Tuesday Morning's website adding a blue ceramic bowl to my cart. It cost $38 plus shipping, which was almost exactly what my first full paycheck had been after taxes.
I hadn't kept a dime. The whole thing went to this bowl for Margaret.
Margaret was my ex's mother. She'd seen it in a shop window last March and said it reminded her of the one her grandmother used to mix cornbread batter in. I wasn't dating her son anymore. That had ended in June, quiet and mutual and still a little raw.
But I kept thinking about her face in that window. The way she pressed her hand to the glass like it was a living thing.
The jury summons was still on my fridge, three weeks past the date I'd missed. I'd deal with that later. Or I wouldn't. At 1am everything felt both urgent and impossible.
I clicked purchase and sat there in the kitchen dark, listening to the fridge hum. I'd spent everything I'd earned on someone who wasn't even mine anymore to care about.
It occurred to me, slowly, that maybe that was the point. The money was just a way to say I'm still here, I noticed, I remember. That the love didn't have to stop just because the relationship did.
The confirmation email came through and I closed my laptop. For the first time in weeks, I slept.