Seasonal demand

I crack the chocolate heart between my teeth, pooling caramel blood over my tongue. Gritty flakes of salt make me screw up my nose and I swallow hastily, feeling like I’ve taken a shot of seawater. Nasty. Barely edible, even. Saying that, I don’t know what more I was expecting. The strawberry fondant I tried earlier was just fruity chemical slush on the inside.

I should’ve known better than to try another one from the box. The collection was dirt cheap, snatched from the discount supermarket shelf in a post-college rush. The milk collection, so the label says. The skint bastard collection. For those who live for the taste of off-milk and acetone and enough salt to kill small animals.

Is the taste a punishment for breaking the rules of Valentine’s day? Buying consolation gifts for myself is an impressive new low, after all. Maybe if the battered cardboard was packaged in gilded wrapping paper, stamped with rainbow washi tape and lashed together with ribbons, the disappointing flavour would be easier to stomach.

Indulging in this particular fantasy is against my best interests, but I’ll bite anyway. Inside the gaudy cerise lid, there’d be a message scratched in calligraphy, printed next to a cluster of doodled vines and flowers. My name would be in brush script – lengthened to Andrew, knowing the prick I’m uselessly daydreaming about – and his would be slightly bigger, flouncing across the makeshift page with flamboyant curls and flicks. From Oscar.

In true Oscar tradition, there would be a tiny artistic print nestled next to the note – an A5 canvas with an overly flattering portrait of me. My cinnamon scruff of hair would be combed flat, my cheeks flushed to hide their usual grim pallor. He knew how to paint me into someone better. An idealized creature that I loved to believe in.

He made it easy. When I was rendered in cloudy watercolour, the background was a clean white slate, occasionally mint or coral brushstrokes to contrast the clothes he’d chosen for me. An empty sky, my life reloaded in fiction.

The sickly aftertaste coats my inner cheeks. My real-life backdrop isn’t so sweet. No matter how much I try to reorganize the clutter, fighting for every last inch of floor space, every surface in my bedroom is a dusty collage of crumpled study notes, scattered stationary, joss sticks, books I haven’t read, jars of Lego pieces, shoeboxes, stones from the beach, plant pots I’ve bought and left to die. Things that are too old to remember the origin of and things I bought yesterday. Anything, everything. Not even Oscar could scrub away the rubbish tip that surrounds me.

He could never be more than a lingering distraction, a pair of warm hands to drag me from my hoarder’s den into Winter’s watery sunlight. What he didn’t anticipate was that I’d always crawl back into my filthy pit the second he let go. He could heal me for an afternoon, maybe for an evening on the pier, but no more. Even his terrier-heart love had limits.

Sucking idly on another stolen heart, my eyelashes flutter in the stuffy air. It’s no real mystery why he broke it off. You can’t steal from the man you love and expect to get away with it. I flick my tired eyes to my double-glazed window, taking in the stack of Valentine’s day giftsets piled up precariously on the ledge. Holiday seasons make my habit too easy. Everything is on sale and it's drenched in garish colours and magpie-trigger glitter and my God, you just have to buy it.

Buy, beg, borrow, steal - it's all the same. Anything to fill the void. I say I'm fighting the tide of commodities, but on days like this, when my heart has its own sugary toothache and I've got Oscar's disappointed face branded on my brain, I just let myself drown. If I was going to lose my boyfriend over a fistful of rings and belt chains and cash, I might as well indulge in the spoils of war.

I'm down to his last tenner, crushed in the crumb-laced pocket of my bomber jacket. Spitting the white chocolate dregs into the overflowing bin, I stretch out on my mattress, sliding my hand into my trouser pocket. It's a wonder they haven't nicked me for credit card fraud yet, though maybe Oscar's too rich and stupid to notice the money dripping from his account.

I chew the plastic, eyes like feline slits. It's nice of Oscar to fund my Valentine's binge. The thought would turn his stomach - but that makes it all the better. Pathetic teenage vengeance always livens up my dry bloodstream.

Lounging back in my landfill kingdom, my lips twitch into a grin, the card balanced between my lips. Who says you can't buy love?