For Amanda

Twenty-Four

Dear Amanda, 

It is true what some people say that you will never know what you had until it's gone. But what's truer is that you will never really know what you had until you clean your house. I just proved that right since I started cleaning the whole house this morning. My boss gave today as a day off since they're going to do this whole renovation thing today. Mr. Gonzales calls it "Redecorating", which is a sugarcoated way of saying "We're going to be bankrupt soon."

If you were here Amanda, you would definitely sigh and say, "Good that you've finally realized that this house needs some cleaning". What made me clean the house? It was this crazy imagination I had. I thought, "What if Amanda decides to come home one day and finds the entire house still looking like a shithole?" That really pushed me to finally use the vacuum cleaner. If ever you come back, I want you to come home to a clean and peaceful house. You know, like everything feels like brand new; like we are going to start on a clean slate. If ever you decide to come back home, I want us to put everything in the past where it rightly belongs. I don't want us to keep on recalling things that's already done. I want us to start anew, if ever that's going to be possible. 

I started cleaning the kitchen first because I really think it needs more attention than all the other parts in the house. There were boxes of Chinese food and pizza, styrofoam cups, and plastic bottles of Coke everywhere. I haven't cooked anything since you left. Hard to believe? Well the trash in the kitchen is proof. You were the one who loved the kitchen the most. You used to print out recipes almost everyday and try to cook it. Sometimes you even recreate dishes. You were like the Einstein of cooking and it's one of the many things I love about you. After you left, the kitchen is one of the places in the apartment that I don't like staying in. Okay well maybe I was just too lazy to cook. 

The black trash bags were so full that I was worried it might rip out any time soon and I'd have to do the job all over again. I threw them out immediately and proceeded to scrubbing the kitchen counter. I cleaned the stove and sanitized the cupboards after. I have also carefully stacked the plates (with those squiggly blue pattern) that we bought together in Ikea. After cleaning the kitchen, I went on to cleaning the bathroom. It wasn't too hard after all. Scrubbing the tile floors and the toilet bowl wasn't so hard after all. Really. Slipping from time to time was...okay. 

The bedroom was the last place in the apartment that I cleaned and it took me about four and a half hours. There were so many things that I found; things that sort-of lured me into a thirty-minute trip down memory lane. I found your long-lost The Body Shop cocoa butter body scrub (which was already half-empty) and your pink loofah. I hid them in the plastic cabinet because you spent too much time in the bathroom when they were still not "lost". I also found our matching brown water bottles. Remember the silly thing? Your bottle was printed with, "Love of his life" and mine, "Love of her life". We used to carry it all the time and all our friends would call us cheesy or annoying. Right now, looking at these bottles that we thought were cool and cute before, makes me want to laugh my head off. I don't know what came into our minds when we decided to buy it. The print in my water bottle had faded now and yours has chipped away. Well I guess it's telling me something that's so hard to do. 

I found the whole DVD box set of Friends that you watched for an entire summer. It was pretty incredible how you managed to finish the entire ten seasons while getting really stuck and busy with your job at that time. Of all the things I found in the bedroom we used to share, one thing really sucked me into what seemed and felt like a five-year journey into memory lane. It was a scrapbook. Inside it were bits and pieces of our relationship. There were photos, movie tickets, dried flowers, chocolate wrappers, cards and letters. I never knew you kept all these and took the time to write captions for each photo and memorabilia. You made it into a hybrid of a scrapbook and a diary. Going through each page made the tiny pieces of my already-broken heart, break even more. 

I didn't know that an already-broken heart could still break until today.

Brian