During the pandemic, I went through a big breakup, like many others did. The Melbourne lockdowns forced a lot of couples into cohabitation much earlier than planned, and it seemed there was a clear divide of COVID Couples: you either survived the storm, or you ended up single again.
Of course, the lockdowns were not linear. There were varying degrees of restrictions, but the most daunting for me stayed consistent: no interstate travel.
When the government first announced the border closures, I was left with an imminent decision: get on the first flight back home to my parent's house on the Gold Coast or stay in Melbourne.
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It had been less than a year since I'd left home, and I was not ready to let anything get in the way of my determination to live interstate or my new relationship—not even a global pandemic.
So I stayed put.
I don't need to recap what happened in the lockdowns; how it felt for so many of us to sit around anxiously waiting for the next press release from former premier Dan Andrews; how, after some time, the fatigue wore off and we became delirious at the announcements, placing bets with one another about what it meant if Dan wore a North Face versus a suit as the presser began.
With the intimate partner rule in place, I was spending a lot of time at my partner's flat. I had a brief stint of living alone in the CBD, but when Stage Four restrictions came into place and I didn't have a car, my anxiety grew.
My partner and I decided it would be best that I move in with him and his brother who were already living together in a two-bedroom flat, which is a decision I will always be thankful for—especially considering that after less than two months of living together, my grandmother passed away in Queensland, ripping my heart in two.
Amid my grief, we found a larger property in the same complex for the three of us to move into.
Lockdowns weren't showing any signs of lifting, and we were all excited by the prospect of having a spacious balcony to enjoy around the clock rather than only having one hour in a public park a day.
While we were already cohabiting, I hadn't exactly moved in. In a time of such high emotional distress, I knew I really needed a place to call my own.
With a new flat came new beginnings—and new furniture. The following year I went home to enjoy a beachside Christmas while my partner stayed with his family in Melbourne. When I boarded my plane back down south, I was single for the first time in years.
The breakup didn't necessarily come as a surprise. We had been struggling for quite some time, with neither one of us wanting to admit it. The two years we spent together battling lockdowns and grief and panic attacks and my infertility diagnosis left us harbouring a storm that would weather anyone, let alone two people who were thrown into the deep end of a relationship before we had even found our feet as a couple.
What did come as a surprise was the email I received four weeks post-breakup from my ex's work email account titled "Depreciation estimates".
I opened the email and found a spreadsheet of every piece of furniture we had bought together—and then some.
The spreadsheet broke down who had paid for each furniture item, its depreciation value due to usage, and its resale value. He was an actuarial scientist, and he truly put that professional qualification to work for this personal vendetta.
While the actual Excel file is long lost to the void of deleted memories, there are some things a mind can never forget. This is a brief outline of what it contains:
What the spreadsheet initially contained. Image: Supplied.
We had used Splitwise to track all of our finances while living together, and while I've never enquired as to how he actually compiled this above list (whether it was walking around our flat with a notepad doing inventory or exporting details of our shared bank account), I do remember the ongoing Splitwise requests that followed the depreciation email.
I'm sure my very non-mathematical recap of his hard work would make him shudder in his RMs—almost as much as I did when he tried to charge me depreciation on an air fryer that my Grandma bought for me.
The spreadsheet had many more rows than the example above, and it included the depreciation of furniture that I had been using over the past two years which I hadn't financially invested in—considering the brothers had purchased it together well before they even knew of my existence.
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The mattress was particularly difficult to reconcile, considering I had sold my beloved mattress and bed frame when we moved in together and also now had to purchase a new one while he got to sleep soundly, likely dreaming of when the thousands of dollars I apparently owed in depreciation would hit his bank account.
A note attached to the bottom of the email also included the rent I owed for the previous month, a month in which I had spent sleeping at my friend's apartment while disentangling our lives (and belongings) back into 'mine' and 'his' rather than the sacred 'ours'.
I sobbed over the spreadsheet before I realised the sheer ludicracy of it. He made four times as much as I did, and had received an annual bonus that was only a few thousand dollars less than my entire annual salary just a few months prior.
But my friend who had taken me in happened to be a family divorce lawyer, and she assured me he had no legal grounds to stand on. After all, we couldn't exactly have a custody battle over a $45 bookshelf from Kmart.
The email was deleted, the depreciation remains unpaid, and the Kmart bookshelf is living happily ever after at a friend's house despite being a child of divorce.
Still looking for a guy in finance? Because I'd look elsewhere.
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Feature image: Supplied.
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