Scooping the styrofoam peanuts out of the box felt a lot like dragging out big handfuls of his own guts; it half-disgusted him to do it, but he kept it up anyway, pulling out fists of pale-green lumps and dumping them into a half-filled trashbag. They were squishy like guts, too (or, at least, squishy like he imagined they might be), but not dripping with gore and blood(as he also imagined they would be), so it wasn’t nearly as vomitrocious, but it was still pretty damn bad. He didn’t like doing it, and by God he wished he could be doing something else—ice skating with his testicles, or artfully diving into a pool of acid—but it felt like the only thing he could do without going mad, right now.

Once the box was empty, every last peanut dragged out of every last crevice with wincing exactness, he went around his room, picking up this thing and that thing, opening this drawer and that drawer, gathering item after item and piling them up into his steadily-overwhelmed arms until he was half-tottering on his feet.

He dropped them onto his bed, the heap of objects sitting in a disconsolate clutter next to the box. He looked at them for a moment, sitting down in his half-broken chair and staring at them with a sort of numb dismay that made the insides of his heart turn dead and black and crumbly like old charcoal.

Then he got up, and began to put item after item into the box, arranging them so he could pack as many of them as possible, not wanting to have to go hunting for another box to put some miniscule side-item in later. He tried not to, but he ended up thinking about each one as he arranged it within the cardboard interior, even though it was agony to do so.

First, a few cards, a couple for Christmas, one for birthday, and one for their two-year anniversary together; this one was his favorite, as it had a pair of cuddling white tigers on it, set against a sky sprinkled with stars and showcasing the sharp shape of a ghostly crescent moon. It went face-down into the box, along with all the other cards.

A little vase of silk roses went in next, acting as a paperweight as it weighed down on the cards.

A cap that was a vivid Crayola green went over that, its front adorned with a white circle and a letter L; there wouldn’t be any joking about looking for Mario and knocking on dressers and endtables. Not anymore.

Crammed in beside these were three stuffed animals:

A weird pink penguin with a ridge of green going down along its back and up to to the top of its head; it had odd-shaped arms that they were no longer going to get to joke about.

A honey-colored bear that had been built especially for him as a Valentine’s present. A cuddly thing that had been staring at the inside of a closet for a while (much to his guilty surprise), it now had to stare at the black insides of the box.

The fluffiest panda bear in all of existence, black and white and cute all over, although it was a bit unclean from too much cuddling in the dead of night; it would now never get the wash that he’d been intending to give it for the last couple weeks.

After that, he tossed in a trio of DVDs: the hilarious, clay-addled Chicken Run, the bombastic and guitartastic Under Blackpool Lights, and the rude and lewd Stewie Griffin movie. They were tucked into place between the panda and the Valentine bear, never to be watched again.

They were joined shortly afterwards by three volumes of the venerable One Piece manga and The Tale of Pikachu: Electric Boogaloo. Fine reading, whose pages would never again feel eager fingers flipping the pages or wide brown eyes soaking up the story.

A shiny black DS Lite, its surface smudged with a million fingerprints, with its Wii wrist strap and its missing stylus. He’d wanted to play Pokemon against her on it, but, as with everything else, he knew he wasn’t going to be getting that chance. He buried it under everything.

He added a video game (Elebits) to the box, then reluctantly reached over to his desk, picking up the one thing he hadn’t gathered with all the other objects: a photo of her, encased in a wooden frame that was a rich and romantic red, a frame that he had picked out himself for this photo that he had eagerly begged her for. She was smiling at him in it, but he didn’t know if the true her was smiling or not right now—he hoped so, but some part of him knew it was foolish to think so. He gave her beautiful smile one last look before gently adding it to the contents of the box and only reluctantly letting go of it.

And here came the hardest part.

He pulled two things out of his pockets: a green velvet drawstring bag and a black leather wallet that looked like it had seen better days—in a war. He didn’t dare look in the bag, at the quartz gemstones and the silver puzzle piece necklace and the jade heart (especially not the jade heart), he just quickly pushed it into the box, gritting his teeth and clenching his eyes against the deluge of tears that had built up behind his eyelids, threatening to burst out of his ocular levees and flood his face in burning rivers of blood-hot tears. He didn’t open the wallet until he was sure he wasn’t going to break down; he needed his eyes for seeing, not crying. Not yet. Not now.

He flipped open the trifold of his wallet and found her smiling at him again, and he managed to smile back, but it faltered and disintegrated when he remembered. Swallowing hard, he pulled first one, then two, then three pictures out of the little plastic picture holder. They were light and papery, but they felt like lead panels as he slid them into the box with a trembling reverence, feeling them fall away from his fingers, along with his hopes, and his dreams, and his happiness.

He sat back down on his crippled chair, his hands on his knees, and stared blankly around. He wasn’t crying yet, but maybe he would soon. For the moment, he just looked at the wall with a dead face, the muscles slack, the eyes glazed, and the heart gone, laying there in the box, bleeding.

What now?