Natalie was in a hurry. She was moving in two days, and she still had to pack up her belongings. That was too big a word for what she owned – stacks of worn romance paperbacks, a glass jar filled with small rocks she’d picked up on beaches over the years and T-shirts from every rock-and-roll concert she’d attended from the time she had a mouth full of braces and cheeks dotted with acne.

Natalie found someone in the grocery store wearing a red shirt and tapped him on the shoulder. The young man was wearing ear buds, oblivious to the sounds around him.

“Excuse me, do you have any extra boxes?” she asked him. He nodded and told her to check in the back through the folded doors by the milk cooler. “Just go on in. Nobody cares if you take boxes.”

Natalie pulled her backpack tighter and headed to the back of the store. She pushed through the double doors and saw boxes in a big container. Some had already been flattened while others were ripped or torn. Natalie started going through the boxes. She pushed the big boxes to the side. No way she’d be able to lift those once they were filled.

The perfect boxes, she decided, were the “Goldilocks boxes” – not too big, not too small. Natalie flattened all but one box and put the flattened ones in that box. She maneuvered out of the grocery store, careful not to knock over the cardboard display of Hostess Twinkies and not just because she didn’t want to pick them up. Those Hostess treats were irresistible and late-night snacking was just one of her many escape-from-reality tricks these days.

She got the boxes in the back seat of her Camry and then safely up the stairs to her apartment door. Natalie fished the house keys out of her backpack and let herself into the apartment. It was quiet. For the past year, she’d come home to the sound of her boyfriend, Josh, playing video games or Creedence Clearwater Revival playing almost full blast.

“Babe, there’s just no comparison,” Josh would say, pushing another Dorito in his mouth. “Just try and find a better song than ‘Fortunate Son.’ Did you know that’s an anti-war song?”

Of course she knew “Fortunate Son” was a rally against the Viet Nam war. She wondered if Josh knew anything about the politics of the 1960s. She sure did. Natalie’s father was an expert on the Viet Nam conflict, as he called it, and that conversation was a frequent topic at Sunday dinners. Some days she wanted to ask Josh if he knew the names Malcolm X, Medgar Evers or he’d ever read the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But who was she kidding? Both she and Josh had put each other in boxes months earlier. She was the sentimental person in the relationship – she kept movie stubs, ripped-in-half concert tickets and those T-shirts. Once Josh made her a bet – if she could show him a shirt from The Bangles or The Go-Gos, he’d clean the bathroom for six months. That was a bet she won fair and square. Josh was a dreamer but not about relationships or his purpose in life. He was determined to perfect a recipe for bathtub beer and learning how to count cards to win at blackjack in New Orleans. Las Vegas, he’d proclaim, was too jaded.

But now, the apartment was quiet, deathly quiet, and she had a job in front of her. The night she and Josh fought to the point where both were screaming and crying and then drained, Natalie knew their relationship was finished. They called it quits. Natalie said she’d stay in the apartment since she had a steady income as a public school teacher. Josh was an unemployed software developer. He said he was going to move back in with his parents and could be out in two weeks. At the time, Natalie was so angry, she told Josh he had until the end of the week to leave.

“Fine,” he’d told her. “I can make it even faster than that.”

For once, Josh was good to his word. The next day, when Natalie was teaching second graders, Josh recruited a couple of friends and cleaned everything he owned out of the apartment. Natalie came home to a garbage bag filled with trash outside the front door, a closet with empty hangers and the apartment key on the kitchen counter.

“He even took the extra toilet paper out of the cabinet,” Natalie told her co-teacher the next day.

Now it was her turn to pack. She decided she needed to find a one-bedroom place closer to school. It didn’t take her long to find a suitable apartment exactly where she needed it to be located. In a matter of hours, she’d signed sign a new lease. Natalie knew she’d learn to appreciate a place that was cheaper and didn’t have the wandering ghosts of Natalie and Josh haunting the rooms. But she’d dragged her feet leaving their apartment. Maybe she was hoping she and Josh could patch things up. Maybe, she told herself after finishing a carton of ice cream, she’d seen too many Disney movies.

But her back was up against the wall. The lease on this place was up in two days, and she’d put off packing long enough. It was time, as her mother would say, to roll up her sleeves and get crackin’.

Natalie dropped the boxes on the carpet and took off her jacket. She looked around and saw quite a few things Josh had overlooked.

“Guess he was in a hurry to get away from me,” she thought bitterly. She considered having a bonfire with the things he’d left behind, but that wasn’t her style. She’d figure out what to do with those odds and ends later.

Natalie rummaged around in the box pile and opened up one of the medium-sized boxes, taping the bottom shut. She started taking paperbacks off the bookshelf. There were at least a dozen books by Stephen King – she’d never own a St. Bernard, that was for sure – and a few romance paperbacks. When Josh saw those, he opened one up and started reading aloud.

“Horatio’s full lips met Darcy’s and the passion was instantaneous…” he began, and Natalie lunged across the couch and ripped the book from his hands, both of them laughing.

“Hey, a girl needs a little romance from time to time,” she’d told him. He’d leaned over and kissed her deeply and told her she wouldn’t need those books now that she was living with him.

When she put the romance books in the box, Darcy sarcastically thought not only did she need those books for the romance that was missing in her life, but she should’ve told him to take some as an instruction manual for how to handle a woman.

When the box was full, she closed the top – over, over, over, under, her father had taught her, and wrote “books” on top of the box. Funny how one brown rectangular object could hold so many memories, she thought. She pushed those thoughts aside and kept packing until she’d cleared the bookshelves.

She told herself not to think about what she was doing – just keep packing. After Natalie taped the bottom of one of the bigger boxes and flipped it over, that’s when she noticed what was stamped on the side of the box from the grocery store. It had contained Kleenex. And that’s when the tears hit Natalie. She hadn’t cried since she and Josh decided it was over. She hadn’t shed a tear when she came home and saw his apartment key on the counter. She’d remained dry eyed when she got a letter in the mail addressed to him. The tears didn’t start until she looked at that empty box that had contained Kleenex – a vital part of anyone’s break-up journey – and realized with a hard smack that Josh was gone. Really gone.

Without thinking, Natalie plopped down in the middle of the living room, put the empty Kleenex box over her head and cried hard tears, her body shaking from the sobbing. Finally, she stopped and took the box off her head and filled it with everything Josh had left in the apartment. He’d never notice she’d used the Kleenex box, but for once, Natalie didn’t care that the man she supposedly loved was as shallow as water in a small ditch. She would always know that was the last box of tissues she’d need where Josh was concerned.

And that made her feel like a fortunate son.