Breakups come with rituals: deleting photos, blocking numbers, pretending you’re too emotionally mature to care. And then there’s the hoodie. That soft, oversized, smells-like-him hoodie. The one that somehow still ends up on your bed no matter how many times you swear you’ll put it in a box.
One night, staring at that hoodie like it was mocking me, a thought popped into my brain uninvited — what if I mailed it back… but set it on fire first?
Not really, of course. I wouldn’t actually do it. I don’t even own lighter fluid. But the image? Oh, it was cinematic.
The Crime (Purely Theoretical)
In my mental movie, I was dramatic as hell. Wind blowing, match flickering, me in slow motion holding the hoodie over a tiny bonfire of catharsis. Maybe a little background music — something with a violin, because apparently my imagination runs on movie soundtracks.
Then, after the symbolic flames die down, I fold up the ashes (don’t ask me how that works), tuck them neatly in a padded envelope, and scrawl his address on it. “Return to sender,” I whisper. Poetic. Messy. Harmless.
That little daydream gave me ten seconds of peace. I could feel my brain unclench, like it had finally released the tension of pretending to be above it all. Because honestly? Sometimes the fantasy of petty revenge is the only thing that gets you through the sadness.
Of course, I didn’t torch anything. I ended up tossing it on a chair, where it stayed for a week — the world’s softest ghost haunting my apartment.
Why My Brain Goes There
Here’s the thing: heartbreak is humiliation mixed with laundry. You don’t just lose a person; you inherit their leftovers. Toothbrushes. Chargers. Hoodies. Every one of them whispering, you cared more than he did.
So your brain does what it can. It creates theater. Tiny imaginary crimes that burn away what you can’t talk yourself out of. You picture tossing the hoodie, deleting the contact, walking away like the emotionally stable main character you’re trying to be.
But really, it’s about reclaiming control — even if only in your imagination. You can’t rewrite what happened, but you can write a fake ending that makes you feel a little less pathetic.
It’s harmless delusion, therapeutic mischief. My Floridian version of burning sage, except the smoke smells faintly of cotton blend and regret.
The Real Ending
In the end, I didn’t set it on fire. I washed it. Twice. Folded it up, sealed it in a box, and left it by the door for three days like some symbolic hostage. When I finally mailed it, I felt weirdly empty — like I’d lost a security blanket I didn’t even like anymore.
He never texted to say he got it, which was probably for the best. The act wasn’t for him. It was for me. The imaginary flames did their job.
Now, whenever I see that same hoodie online — the one every guy seems to own — I don’t feel anger. Just a quiet, smug satisfaction that I had the thought, lived through it, and didn’t torch a thing.
Sometimes, that’s enough. The mind gets its little crime, and the world stays unburned.
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