souvenir shops

If it drags me down, what can I do but follow?

My girlfriend found this shop online that will sell you souvenirs of all your favorite memories. Like most souvenir shops, a lot of them are kind of tacky--we really don't need a snowglobe of our first kiss, although the attention to detail is pretty remarkable. When she was shopping it was mostly for her memories, and she was happy to tell me the stories. She really liked the recordings of those memories--available on any type of media you wanted, but she opted for digital downloads, since we don't own a TV and mostly just watch movies on the computer. She also got one or two audiobooks for going over on the way to work.

I didn't look at the shop for myself at first, but eventually we watched a few of her memories and she pressured me into it, so I finally opened it up.

Mostly they were memories of times where I'd fucked up somehow. In all of them, I'd lost something I had hoped to keep forever. Childhood injuries, being rejected by the girls I liked in high school. There were none from the current relationship, but there were entire sections of the shop dedicated to the endings of all my previous relationships--from the ones where it was an awkward and quiet realization that this wasn't working to the ones where there was screaming and cursing and breaking things. Each was represented as a glorious tableau of postcards, coffee mugs and t-shirts.

After my girlfriend left, assuming the store must not work for everyone, I bought the snowglobe of my most recent ex-girlfriend throwing a box of my things on the porch. It captures her mid-throw, looking furious--her mouth is closed because she had not said anything to me in a week at the time. I am standing outside. I don't look angry at all. Instead I look hurt, confused, even apologetic. The look in my eyes is the one that you give to someone who you love very much but who you are never going to see again.

It arrived this morning, while my girlfriend was out. I've spent most of the day just shaking it and watching the little flecks of fake snow fall around the scene. Tonight I'll put it on top of the fridge and forget about it, but for now I've got nowhere better to be. Maybe it's not the store that was broken.