Pink Slush (5 minute freewrite)

Juliette watched listlessly as her miniature blender pulverized the fruit. Her bloodshot eyes watched pockmarked strawberries and overripe bananas descend into baby pink slush. It had been 82 days and 13 hours since Justin had stormed out of the living room, never to be heard from or seen again. For the first 12 days, she tried to call, before she accepted that the straight-to-voicemail response likely meant she was blocked. Juliette had slept an average of 3 hours a night ever since (give or take). She opened her cabinet to find an assortment of expired foods, bottles of half-empty condiments, and moldy bread, with 3 unopened bags of neglected coffee beans.

When she had moved in two years ago, Justin helped furnish her apartment. Juliette had told him long ago that her father’s first present to her mother 27 years ago was a subscription to a weekly coffee delivery service, in honor of their shared love of freshly ground, expensive coffee. One week after moving in, Juliette came home from a long day of work to find a small box sitting on her coffee table. She cut the tape around its edges to find a bag of artisan coffee under a business card-sized note: Love, Justin. Every week for the following six months, a small brown box perfectly sized for a small bag of coffee would arrive in the mail, until the subscription ran out. She lamented the day that the boxes stopped coming.

Three weeks ago, she opened her door to find another small box sitting at the doorstep. She picked it up contemplating the possibilities. Did the coffee service make a mistake? Had they reactivated his subscription without his knowledge? Had he reactivated it himself as an apology for having left without a trace? If so, why wasn’t he calling? For days, she debated contacting the service to confirm the billing address, but concluded that the risk was too high that they’d acknowledge the mistake and cancel it, her one connection to her lost relationship. Every week, for three weeks, she’d hastily cut open the package and delighted in the smell. And yet, without a companion to share it , she never quite managed to open the bags. So it stayed in her mostly bare cabinet of equally neglected foods, all predating 82 days and 13 hours ago, mimicking Juliette’s own emotional entropy.