Chim - Turn To Stone

Chapter 12

Twelve

I turned up to Nadine’s in tears but thankfully she was in and alone so I didn’t have to lie to anybody and explain what was wrong. “oh my god” she said upon seeing the state I was in. She pulled me in to her living room and sat me down on the sofa before sitting next to me and giving me a hug.

“I think its really over Nadine” I said through my tears, finding it hard to breath. It was only when I said it out loud that I realised how final it sounded.

No more me and Cheryl.

“what happened” she asked me.

“I was sat there listening to her tell me how much she loved me and wanted me to forgive her and I just realised that I don’t think I ever could. I told her I needed time to think” I took a few deep breaths to compose myself before wiping my eyes.

She was about to say something back to me when her house phone started to ring. She got up and gave me an apologetic look before answering it. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to work out it was Cheryl on the other end, I could hear Nadine from the hall way telling her to calm down and that I was at home with her.

I text Nicola and told her to go round to our house and check on Cheryl, knowing that she probably needed a friend as much as I did. She replied straight away and told me she would be there in 15 minutes.

Despite everything that was happening, I really did feel sorry for her. A part of me even accepted that she cheated on me for reasons that i would never really understand but a bigger part of me knew that if I went back straight away, it would never work out.

I heard Nadine telling Cheryl to stay at the house and that she would make sure I was okay. I was almost about to break and get up to grab the phone and speak to Cheryl when Nadine hung up and came back in.

“that was Cheryl, she sounds pretty upset” Nadine told me as she sat back down. She sighed deeply as she pulled me down on to her lap. “you think I made the wrong decision don’t you” I asked her.

“I don’t know. I think she’s sorry though” she said, stroking my hair.

“I know she is sorry, and the stupid thing is I know that if I took her back, I don’t think she would ever cheat on me again, but its not enough. Knowing she is sorry doesn’t wipe the images of them two from my head. It doesn’t stop me thinking about how she lied to me or how she hurt me”

That was the hardest thing to deal with. In every other way I knew I could forgive her. I could forgive her for being weak enough to fall for some guy who told her what she wanted to hear, I could forgive her for not having the balls to tell me that she had met him before and he wouldn’t leave her alone. I could even forgive the fact that she lied to me. But in the end, none of it mattered because the one thing I couldn’t do was forget.

“sometimes I wish I could go to sleep, wake up and find out it was all a dream” I muttered to her before closing my eyes. Sleep seemed to be the only thing that I really wanted, it was the only place I could actually forget about what was going on around me.

-

I woke up with a start, a loud noise outside jolting me out of my dreams. The first thing I seen when I opened my eyes was Cheryl sat on the chair opposite me. I rubbed my eyes and for a brief moment wondered if I was actually dreaming.

I sat up quickly when I realised that I was not dreaming, and Cheryl was in fact sat opposite me, watching me sleep.

She had a box on her knee which caught my attention but I didn’t ask what it was, instead I just looked at her questioningly, wondering why she was here. “I want you to have this” she said to me after a minute or two.

She held the box out in my direction and I took it from her. “what is it” I asked, putting it down on the floor next to my feet.

“its my box of memories, everything good that happened to me…to us, is in that box. All I want you to do is look at the stuff inside. I know nothing will make you forgive me, but I hope that if you can at least remember all the good times we shared, it might take the place of the bad stuff that’s in your head right now” she said to me before getting up.

I watched her walk to the door where she gave Nadine a quick hug before leaving. I stood up quickly and went to the window, just in time to see her driving off out of Nadine’s garage way. “I’m going to go out for a bit, will you be okay on your own” Nadine asked.

I smiled to myself knowing that there was absolutely nowhere that she had to be, but she knew me well enough to know that I needed time on my own to look at what Cheryl had given me. “I will be fine” I said to her, and for the first time in a long while, I actually believed it.

I waited until the front door closed and then I picked the box up and put it on the sofa next to me. I have always known that Cheryl is sentimental, when I bought her flowers for the very first time, she took a picture of them which still sits over our fire place today.

Maybe it wasn’t ‘our’ fireplace anymore. Perhaps it was her fireplace. We bought the house together so technically, it was still ‘ours’ even though I wasn’t there to appreciate it.

I lifted the lid off the box and put my hand inside, pulling out the first thing that came to my hand. It was the heel off my stiletto.

It fell off on our first proper date. Of course nobody knew it was a date but us at the time. We were walking in the rain from the restaurant back to Cheryl’s house when I fell down the curb and snapped my heel.

It was a toss up between getting a taxi or a piggy back home, and because we were both a little bit tipsy, the piggy back won hands down. It was the weirdest first date I had ever been on, but one I told her I would never forget.

I put the broken heel down on the other side of me and reached in to the box again. The next thing I came across was a keyring. It took me a while to realise what it was but I soon remembered that it was the keyring she had bought two years ago to put on our first set of house keys. I riffled through some of the other things in the box, things that would mean absolutely nothing to anyone else but me and Cheryl.

My eyes fell on to a napkin at the bottom of the box. I picked it up and looked at it closely, feeling a lump forming in my throat. She had kept the napkin from the dinner we had on our first anniversary.

Every item that I looked at held a special moment in our lives together that until today, I had forgotten all about. There was a stack of love letters in the bottom, I didn’t have to read them though, I was the one who wrote them. There was a little hotel soap bar from the hotel that we stayed at the first time we had sex and a little ring from a toy machine that i got for her on one of our drunken nights out.

For a while I just sat there staring at all the contents of the box, each memory finding its way in to my head, making me smile and then leaving, making room for the next one.

Before I knew it I was crying again, but this time I was crying for a different reason. I was crying because I knew I had made a mistake. All of these memories were what really mattered to me, it was all of the stuff in this box, stuff that would be other peoples junk, which were our treasures.

One bad memory didn’t have to reside over and take over all of the good memories that we shared. And it was the only bad memory, I could have sat there for hours, trying to think of another one and come up with nothing.

I jumped a little bit as somebody knocked on the window. It was only when I went to the door and opened it that I realised it was Cheryl. “did you look in the box” she asked me expectantly, still waiting on the step.

I didn’t say anything to her, instead I opened my arms and fell in to her on the door step, holding her so tight that I wasn’t sure whether or not I was hurting her. She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me back, and that’s where we stayed for what could have been a minute or an hour.