breakup

Whole

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I’m scanning the internet for a meme, a joke… something to express all of my fears as something light and silly, something laughable to get it off my chest…but there isn’t anything. I want a way to say it all out loud because I’ve been carrying it around for weeks, and I don’t know how to say what I need to say without feeling pathetic. But still, I can’t do this alone.

I feel hot, then cold, then numb. I’m tired and I have to lay down. I reach for a bottle of whiskey and tell myself that I’ll still be a woman when all of this is over. I run my fingers over my scars.

I never wanted my womanhood to be defined by sex and childbearing, but suddenly unable to do either, I find myself grappling with my value as a human. Will anybody want me? Do I have anything left to give? It was supposed to be a robotic surgery, picking through my muscles and nerves for adhesions, when suddenly the doctor sprung on me that the best option, really, the option I’d ultimately need, was a hysterectomy. The disease is already growing back, they said. Your organs will fail you anyway.

What?

Maybe this is a good thing. That’s what I tell myself, likely because I have to. Stay on the sunny side. Never again can someone claim they don’t want children, sucker me into a relationship, and then drop the bomb that I can’t fulfill their needs and they just thought I would change. One boyfriend knew three weeks in that kids were not an option with me, and he told me he didn’t want any. Then one night, in an ugly drunken slur I would come to know far too well, he told my best friend he had absolutely always wanted children. He just secretly believed I would change. When I left, he accused me in a torrent of scorn and sarcasm.

“I’m so sorry I wanted marriage and a family!”

Because my choices are valueless and less important than his. Because I must have never wanted to be married or have a family of my choosing. Because my body is perfect and functioning. Because any man has the right to demand pregnancy of a woman.

My friend Mia always calls it like it is. “ ‘Sorry I wanted marriage and a family‘? That’s a nice way of saying ‘Sorry I baited you into relationship based on a lie.’” She was right. She usually is.

I can’t change myself. I can’t change that I want to foster troubled kids before I’d ever feel the need to push one out of my body. I can’t change that my reproductive organs have been weaponized to devour the rest of my body. Auto immune diseases are a living nightmare. Your body betrays you, and mine is destroying itself.

Maybe men will have to want me for who I am after this.  Maybe the truth of my body will shut it all down. Maybe it’s a good thing.

This probably isn’t true. I suppose someone can still romance me, pretend they don’t want children, and then drop me a few years in. Even the lack of a uterus can’t put off a man on the hunt. I’ve heard the words, “You’re my dream girl.” enough times to make me shudder. I can’t be your dream, I’m just a person. How could someone who can’t have children be your dream girl if that’s what you’ve always wanted? I’m exhausted trying to carry around the fantasies projected onto me because I look good in blue jeans and tell witty jokes. I’m nobody’s dream girl. I’m a woman with scars and sight and perspective. I’m not damaged or broken, but I’ve seen some ugly things, and I’ve survived them. I’ve learned and I’ve grown and I’ve evolved into something wiser, quicker, stronger, and more assured. I have power and value beyond my ability to satisfy someone else’s needs. I sometimes falter, but I know this.

I’m better now. Happier. Free of constant shaming. Free of control. Of always being wrong to him, being told I have terrible morals and am making wrong choices. I’m free of not being allowed to hang out with my friends without retribution. Of being yelled at for scheduling my own doctor appointments without asking permission. I am free.

But I also wake up in the hospital bed alone. There is no one to sleep in the chair overnight. No one to hold me while I drift in and out, bandaged and bleeding, No one placing a stuffed animal in my arms and telling me they love me. Today, I am my strongest, fullest self I ever have been…

But in these moments, waiting for the terrible things that will help or hurt me, waiting for the days of liquid food and throwing up in garbage cans, waiting for my eighth, ninth, and tenth surgical scars… I am lonely.

They tell me I can’t wear my red lipstick in the OR, but I need to feel strong, more than just a piece of meat and a compilation of statistics, so I paint all of my nails black and shiny.

I am powerful, I tell myself.

When I wake up at 3am to take the two anti-microbial showers, I am strong.
When I can’t eat for days and have to drink a gallon of chalk, I am strong.
When I spend the days bleeding and sleeping, I am strong.

 
And when I wake up with no uterus, I’ll be alone. But alone with the smallest hope, the belief planted inside me that I have to hang on to – that I am still good enough, whole enough, to be loved.

Break Them, Lose Them, Leave Them

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Lauren and I are decorating the tree.  We’re decorating the tree because it is December, because I’m a flexible Jew, and because Lauren is princessy enough to counteract all of my not caring about anything at all.  So we have a tree, and we’re putting pink tulle around it.  That’s how Lauren rolls.

I’m lucky to have her, and I’m glad she’s like this.  She gets me outside of myself sometimes, and I need that.  I pull out her snowmen, her angels and stars, and I smile.

“I almost got new ornaments this year,” I say, mostly to myself.

“Almost?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I wanted to get some, but then I thought, why bother?”

“What?”

“I mean, I move.  I just, I always move.”

“But.. that doesn’t mean you can’t have nice things.”

“Yeah, I know… I know… it’s just how I am with nice things.  I either break them, lose them, or have to leave them behind when I go… and then I’m just… I’m so sad… so I just don’t really bother with things at all anymore.”

The second it comes out of my mouth, I realize how bad it sounds.  But I’m just being realistic.  I’ve moved so many times that anything I can buy more cheaply than ship gets thrown out.  Anything I have to worry about breaking is a huge liability, and anything I can forget has already been left somewhere between Fort Lauderdale and Finland.

I’m embracing myself, I say. I’m just admitting that I suck at this.

But it’s more than that, if I’m being honest.  It’s more than that.  I’ve lived here for a year without a dresser or blinds.  Without a phone that isn’t shattered or pillowcases my old roommate’s cat didn’t chew.  One day I woke up and realized that I wasn’t ready to settle in because I still hadn’t been able to admit I’d ended up here.  I haven’t moved on.  Not in theory, not in life.  Not at all.

*****

People forget, and I try to forget, but I can’t.

TOSHIBA TRANSFERS II 1709

The word “bride” made me itchy. I couldn’t wear it, it didn’t fit.  I was terrible at ogling place settings and invitations.

Every sales clerk at every bridal store had pitched it the same.

“He’s English!” They’d squeal.  “You’re going to live in Barcelona!” They’d shriek.

“It’s a fairytale!”

And I would nod, awkwardly, with a white dress 6 sizes too big clipped to me with the big orange bridal store clamps I’ve discovered they use to strap the samples on you.  The dresses never felt right, but I loved him fiercely, and he and I were going to build the life I’d always thought was out of reach.

The engagement was, truthfully, a dream come true.  Embracing everything I’d ever wanted with the man who always made me laugh and kissed me like the world was ending.  No fear, side by side, traveling, living in a foreign country again.  He would grin, sweeping me around in his arms, making plans.  The first place he wanted to take me was Italy.  We’d take weekend trips to Istanbul and buy produce from the farmer’s market by my language school.  We’d live in a shoe box apartment in the Gothic district of Barcelona and give bike tours to tourists, and these would be the years we would talk about for the rest of our lives.

I remember his speech when I brought home the pamphlet for the language school, sighing with longing.

“Why don’t you just go?  You go to school and I’ll work.  You never let anyone do anything for you.  You don’t trust anyone to love you enough.  Let me do this for you… with you.”

And suddenly all the feelings I was never sure I’d have for anyone hit me breathless.  I wanted to marry him, and I knew it.

Three weeks later on one knee, he pushed his grandmother’s ring onto my finger.  Everything I never knew I wanted, I had.

It’s been fifteen months since everything came crashing to the ground.

How do I ever explain how piece by piece, everything fell apart?  The mindfuck of loving a man like him was that his lifelong entitlement and privilege was so complete, he couldn’t even understand why anyone would be upset that all of his promises were empty, and all of his stories were lies.  Every failure he’d ever had he was bailed out of by his wealthy parents.  Everything he’d ever achieved had been purchased for him.  The concept of consequences, that people hurt, that people cared, was lost on him.

When I gave notice at my job he was lying about filing our marriage license.  When I was breaking my lease he was lying about getting a job in Spain to support us.  We had planned to sell his house to purchase a home in Barcelona when it turned out – the house didn’t belong to him.  His parents were bankrolling the charade.  He’d attempt to get off on technicalities and I would angrily force the truth – none of those games mattered.  We were adults.  Trust mattered.  Respect mattered.  Responsibility mattered.  He shrank from me, deflated in realizing his grandiose claims of taking care of us were just an empty boast.  He fell off the grid for a week.  He claimed he didn’t have a phone charger but posted on social media.  I told him I didn’t care where he’d been or what he’d done.  It didn’t matter.  He was nothing to make a husband of.  He was nothing at all.

My job was gone, my home was gone, I had sold my car and spent out my savings on the wedding.  Everything I had worked so hard for my entire life was broken, wasted on this useless man, who thought nothing of what he had cost me. I thought that love meant finally trusting someone with something important, and when finally I opened up to it, I was stripped of everything I had.

In the wake of everything I lost, I collapsed in on myself.  I turned off my facebook, I didn’t return calls.  I cut out everyone who looked at me cross eyed or said an unkind word.  Nothing but a bundle of frayed threads, terrified that if you touch me, I’ll all but come unraveled.

I cried when I saw pictures of old friends together, and I burned the contract for my wedding venue.  I vowed never to lose so much to anyone, ever, ever again.

My dream of traveling the world with someone I loved was just that, a dream.  And looking behind at the wreckage of my life I feel that I can’t take on a single thing if I have to worry that it will be taken away from me, because I just don’t have the strength to watch another thing I love fall apart.  How could finally giving my trust, the best of myself, leave everything in pieces?

Everything I ever wanted broken, lost, and left behind.

***

A year later, after reassembling my life, my heart is still reeling from my losses.  I’ve been wandering through life in some sort of aimless haze, somehow all stuck together on the outside – I got a job, a car, and an apartment again – but hollow on the inside.  Cracked and empty.  I have trouble feeling anything.  These little activities with Lauren make me feel more human.  It’s Christmas, so we’re going to buy a tree topper.  It’s the thing to do.

Lauren and I are strolling aimlessly through the Culver City Target, picking out wrapping paper and buying trash bags.  We talk about the holiday and her latest job interview.  She turns to the wreaths and bows, and I, restless, veer off into the clearance ornaments that no one in the past month felt were worth $6.95.

My eyes feeling glassy, half in and half out of head, I pause to gather myself.  And that’s when I see it.  A little glittery globe.  A shiny promise of the planet.  I pick up the ornament and feel my heart warm with love and desire.  Enticed and enchanted, I hold it for a moment, and walk to the front of the store.

A discount ornament with flecks of dried hot glue, a ball of cheap glitter all over my clothes, and yet… it’s something.  I decide that I want something for the first time in a long time.  Suddenly strong enough to risk another loss.  In the flick of a heartbeat, something in me wakes up.  I am not whole yet, but I am healing.

I clutch the globe to my chest, intent on making it mine.  And though I promise myself to do my best not to break it, lose it, or leave it, I know that if my best leaves it shattered to pieces, or stranded in a suitcase in Belgium, my heart will learn to love something once again.

And in the mean time, I’ve got the world on a string.

Snowflakes

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I think it’s been about five years, and people still ask about you.

I think it’s been five years because I don’t count.  I’ve never counted.  I try not think about it at all.

When I do try to talk about you, I never know where to begin. The first time I saw you and we locked eyes across a common hall packed full of students too young to drink?  Or… your mouth pressed to mine on the balcony in that little town in Spain, high above the world or… that time you got down on one knee and pulled out your grandmother’s ring.

Everyone wants the story, and for once in my life, I don’t know what to say.

I knew you better, and I loved you harder, than anything before or since.  I’m still trying to write about you, where do I ever begin.

***

When we were living in New England, we raced to the top of the hill in the snow, only to have three busses pass us by and leave us shouting, cursing in the slush.  In the nine months I’ve lived here I have grown to hate blizzards, public transit, and the ever growing hole in my left boot that I still can’t afford to replace.

We stood there, growing later for work by the minute, shivering in the dull February morning.  I looked up into the grey sky, all doey eyed California girl, and remark to him on how the snow looks like little jagged chunks.  It only snowed once every other year or so when I was a child, I said. I’ve never really had the chance to see it closely.

He grins, feigning disbelief.  “My American baby,” he says, laughing.  I tell him to shut up as he hooks his arm around my back and draws me to him.

“Here.”

He scrapes my collar with his credit card, and holds it up for me.  I am twenty six years old.  I have never seen a snowflake.  I stare at it, all tiny and perfect as he holds me to him with his other arm – and I can feel him – warm in 10 degrees below zero, warm in the slush up our calves, warm through the two overcoats, three sweaters, and four shirts between us.

I am beaming.  I am full of love.

Windows

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I want to go to his house and break all his windows.  I want to take everything that means anything to him, and curb stomp it into the ground.  I want to punch him in the stomach a thousand times, until he finally hurts as much as I do, and when he does he will cry out and say “Little bee, I had no idea, I’m so, so sorry.”

And he will remember he loves me.  He will will wrap his arms around me, we will cry together, and everything will be the same again.

But they won’t.

And they never, ever will.

Birthday to You.

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I hate planning birthdays.

I just hate it.  I don’t like the stress of having to plan a whole party and make sure it goes well when all I want to do is relax and have fun.  I worry if everyone has enough ice.  I don’t like the fact that half the people who RSVP flake and I spend my lunch breaks reversing and revising the sushi reservation eighteen times.  I don’t like getting older anymore.  I guess I’ve hit that limit.

But I have Ash.  And Ash simply says things like, “I’m free on Saturday, it’s your birthday, see you then.”

As generous and sweet as she is ravenous and ridiculous, Ash shows up with cupcakes you didn’t order and a tiara you don’t want to wear because it is your birthday goddammit and you will enjoy it despite yourself.  Thank god for Ash, where would be without friends like her.

I get the feeling that my tough time planning celebrations harkens back to an ugly history of feeling let down.  Sometimes it just takes a kind hand to guide you and remind you that you’re not a kid anymore, you’re more resilient than you used to be, and regardless of what anyone else does, someone will show up with a damn tiara.  It’s your birthday.

It’s only been two weeks since the last time I spoke to Eddy.  Fourteen days is not a long time to grieve before having to go out and celebrate.  But Ash insists, so I’m insisting to myself, that I’ll have a good time.  Right now I’m just thinking that I have nothing to wear for this damn party.  I have felt out of place in all of my clothes since I lost the ability to wear heels.  My strength was in my extra five inches.  I’ve never been quite sure who I am closer to the ground.  But suddenly, as I’m pushing apart hangers, I am struck by the red dress I had picked out back in December.  The one I knew Eddy wouldn’t like, but I bought it anyway, because it was the first thing I’d found since I’d gotten sick that made me feel like I might still be beautiful.  I was going to wear it just for him, but now that it’s my body, my life, I’m pulling it out.    Life is far too short, and the red dress needs wearing.

The girls come up in a laughing, giggling swarm.  We tumble and swirl around the apartment, the old familiar energy I love.  The frenetic clash of curling irons and blush brushes, the leaning and bending into mirrors, the last eyelash curl before the taxis show up.  The lightness and the love.

Someone tells me I look beautiful, and even in my flat shoes with my hip donut, I somehow, crazily, feel a little beautiful.

We go out to sushi.  I remember this place.  Two weeks into dating Eddy, in the alley here he’d pushed me up against my car, kissing me until we pulled apart laughing, discovering black all over the backs of my calves from the wheel well.  I remember, but my new memories, stronger and searing and expanding by the second, are starting to eat the old.  We reach across each other for more edamame.  We curse chopsticks and shoot more sake.  We swap and taste and tell stories over miso soup.  I am happy.

The lights dim, and suddenly everyone is singing to me.  Ash has a point.  No matter how many years you may do it, there’s something special about people going out of their way to show you love.  I put the damn tiara on while they bring out a giant boat made of fruit.

When dinner’s over we trip back to mine for sweatpants, cupcakes, and card games.  I decide to make a move.  I plunge into my closet and grab Eddy’s birthday present, a sushi and sake set.  He had mentioned in passing several times over the summer how he had wanted one, and after raiding everywhere from Sawtelle to Little Tokyo, I determined nothing in Los Angeles was quite special enough for this man, and (way over my budget) had a set of four cups and plates handmade by a potter.  I have this weird thing with redeeming objects.  If I’m stuck with something that reminds me of you, I can’t get over it until I purge it.  If I can’t bring myself to purge it, I have to somehow make it right.

“Pour them out.” I say, setting the cups on the table.  Chloe, always prepared, has brought a bottle of sake.  Leave it to that girl to expect me to be brave.

“I knew you had it in you.”

“Just hush and let me sip one, I didn’t take my meds today.”

We laugh.  We share.  It was a work of art.  Far too beautiful to smash into the ground (Chloe’s original idea) it has a presence all it’s own.  I thought it was so precise, so exact, that it could only ever be meant for him, and what good was it otherwise?  It seemed wrong to regift something so carefully measured out and planned for someone else.  As it turns out, a room full of girls laughing and holding every piece seemed to soak the pain right out.  Redemption, right?  It all feels good.

It’s at this point that I remember the one thing I still have to get rid of.  He’s off my phone, out of my photographs, and away from my bed, but I still have these damn wine glasses.  The ones he bought each time he took me to a wine tasting.  His thing.  His thing that blew it all up.

“Who wants to smash some glasses tonight?!?”

And I know it sounds ridiculous, but we’re doing the only thing in the world that makes sense.  Trust me, it’s my birthday.  We march out of the apartment, down the stairs and to the car park, armed with glasses inscribed with the names of each and every place I want to forget.  I feel enlightened and I feel powerful and I feel – CRASH!  And the first glass shatters into the dumpster.  I jump, then I laugh, and as we keep going, I get lost in the giggle, the flurry, the buzz of love around me.

There is nothing else in this bedroom neighborhood but Saturday silence.

But here, in my home, there is the sound of girls with curled hair and false eyelashes, stumbling in high heels and short dresses, gasping, screaming – smashing memories into oblivion as we laugh into the night.

Doorways.

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He isn’t the type to show up in your doorway, and that’s a good thing.

When I watch the wrong movie and the man tells the woman he respects her for her tenacity and strength, and that he wants her to be successful because she’s earned it, I cry; he doesn’t come.

When the janitor at work buys me flowers on my birthday that should have come from him, because she still loves me, but he doesn’t anymore, he doesn’t come.

When the rain hits the California ground for the first and only time all winter, not even enough to banish the edges of the drought, but enough to finally wash away the heart he drew with his fingertip on my driver’s side window, he doesn’t come.

He isn’t the type to show up in your doorway.

His pride is more important.  He will tell himself, and he’ll tell me, that it’s maturity.  He will save me, really, from the back and forth; the wavering, heart sucking, gut-wrenching act of pulling myself out of his arms, knowing somewhere deep down that in the end, all he’ll do is throw back a few too many and shatter me into a thousand pieces just like every time before.  His pride is saving me from suffering of a greater kind.  I know that.

And he doesn’t come.  And he doesn’t come.

And at two am I am up in the living room.

And he doesn’t come.

Horizontal

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The field on which

I hated the way you said I had no “values” because I see people with compassion.  Because I believe love has solved more problems than condemning ever has.  Because I believe your version of justice would leave the world with blank eye sockets and toothless gums, choking down their own teeth.

I hated the way you thought that being an upstanding citizen meant looking down on everyone who had it less together than you did.  That if you learned a lesson two years ago you were better than the person learning it today.  That I must be basking in secret sin to be capable of forgiving anyone I saw committing it.  That I was tempting fate by not treating those who have failed with scorn.

I hated how you actually used the term “that guy” constantly.  As in, “I’m not that guy” whenever discussing behavior you felt was beneath you, because as we all know, there are nice guys, and there are douchebags, and you sir, because you don’t smoke or chew or go with girls that do, are a nice guy, and are deserving of a virginal white princess.  If a girl deigns to stir emotions within you (or show an inch more of skin than you have secretly deemed appropriate) she is a slut and a bitch.  It’s better to say, “I’m not that guy” any time I offer solid solutions to proactively work around my illness or urge you to take time off with just the boys, rather than take me up on it and relax for a second.  Better to resist and insist to the point of being insulted, then throw it back in my face six months later.  That’ll teach me.

Since I’m a liar, and faking all of these hospital visits and needles in my spine, I’m probably just a few more hits short of spontaneous healing, so why keep pulling punches, sweetie?  Just let ’em fly.

I sometimes want to beat myself up for not seeing through you, but I am not a mind reader, a soothsayer, or a ghostbuster; and you are quite the genius masquerader, self convincer, and pious martyr.  Glorious be thy name.

A tip of the hat, sir.  You are quite the specimen.

I woke up with a sore shoulder yesterday, because I sleep horizontally on the bed now.  That’s how fucking gone you are.

Too

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It isn’t until the morning after – the sunlight streaming through the half ripped out vertical blinds – that I really feel like shit.

I only had one drink last night, followed by plastic cup after plastic cup of water, and a cold walk in the dark from downtown.  I had spent two hours crying on Travis’s bathroom floor, my phone, screaming drunken accusations, all in text.  Having broken up three days prior to New Year’s Eve, we thought maybe we could talk it out.

“I just don’t want to be around you while there’s all this alcohol.” I said. “I don’t think it’ll help things.”

I asked if I could just go downtown and spend some time with my friends instead of spending the evening alone, because everything was so volatile.  We needed to talk, just not then.

“Okay, sure.” He tells me.

But at two am the texts start rolling in.

“You bitch, you liar. You did this.  I didn’t do this, you did.  This is over, it’s your fault.”

Dumbfounded, I call a thousand times, but he never answers.

“You’re a liar.  You lied to me, I don’t give a shit you fucked up.”

I take off from the bar downtown, a taxi at this time of night is an impossibility, and run as fast as my broken hip can take me down the street, trying to get away from the chaos.  Trying to get him to call me back.  But he won’t.

“You’re in heels you bitch.”

What?!?  I send him pictures of my feet, my shoes… I have a destroyed pelvis.  For the last nine months they have poked me, prodded me, injected me, mangled me, found tumors, diseased bursa, and inflamed bone marrow, but they still don’t know what’s going on.  God, I’m not wearing heels.  He thinks I’m somehow betraying him with footware.

But he won’t respond, he won’t respond.

I’m tripping down the street, sobbing, when down the dark side street, a cab pulls over.

“Honey, what wrong, why you crying?”

But I can’t get any words out.

“Honey, it’s ok.  It’s ok.  I’ll take you home.”

Hysterical, I get into the taxi.  I manage to squeak out the only address I know where I can go to be safe.

The cab pulls up to Travis’s house, and the driver won’t take any money.  He tells me to go inside and that everything will be ok.  “Everything ok!”  He keeps saying, as he pushes the cash back into my hands. I call Travis.

“Travis… are you home?”

“What’s wrong.” He can hear it in my voice.

“I’m downstairs, can you get me?”

The part of this I most wish wasn’t true is that once Travis let me in to his bathroom and lent me a pair of oversized pajamas, I continued to try to beg sense into a drunk man for the next two hours, pulling off my false eyelashes on the bathroom floor.  He’s still screaming, swearing in writing, but he won’t take any of my calls.  Or my thousand requests for Facetime to prove I was where I said I would be.  I was doing what I said I would be doing.  I am frantically texting pictures of my face, my feet, the room, Travis, and begging please.  Please.  I don’t understand.  Why are you doing this to me? Please.  Please.  And so many other stupid words and phrases that turned out to just be words strung together that should have meant something but didn’t.

I stayed on that cold floor until four am.  Begging and grasping and completely lost.  I love him so much.  Why would he do this to me?  Why is he doing this?

And then I realize he is doing this because he has been drinking.  And I realize this is never going to end.  And after all that I feel an amazing sudden clarity; and I realize everything that I need to do next.  I send him a message, and I turn off my phone.  I wash my face, and climb into the far side of Travis’s bed, wearing his old sweats.  I tell myself I’m not going to cry there, but I keep crying there, then asking if it’s ok with his girlfriend that I’m there, then crying again, then saying I’m done crying, then crying some more.  He reminds me that the living room is freezing, that his girlfriend is a secure and kindhearted person, and that we’ve known each other since we were eleven.  It’s ok.  I cry some more and tell him I’ll try to shut up, but since I’ve cried so much I think I’ll probably snore.

Travis falls asleep immediately.

Travis snores.

In the morning, when the sun shines in too bright and it’s maybe only three hours later, we get up, because it’s too light to sleep.

“I want to make you breakfast.” He says, because he is a good friend, and because my stomach is empty, and because I have black rings under my eyes and am in desperate need of care.  I tell him that’s sweet, but not to worry.

“I have eggs!”  He yells, before realizing they’re past the expiration date.

“Eh, whatever.” I say

“You really want to take that kind of a chance?”

“I’m feeling lucky.”

I pause.

“Oh fuck it, I’m feeling the opposite of lucky.  I’m feeling a million times worse than lucky, but I’m feeling so terrible that a couple of bad eggs couldn’t make things any worse.”

Travis laughs.

“Everything you say sounds like it’s a quote from a book or a movie or something.”

“I think men fall in love with me because of that and then leave me when they realize I’m an actual person.”

He hugs me.  We go to Ralphs for eggs.

We make and enjoy breakfast.  I hand him my phone as it turns back on and ask him if there was anything not hideous or hateful said as it rings 8 or 9 times, indicating all the texts to wade through.  Travis checks the phone.

“No.” He says decidedly.  So I don’t read them.

About an hour later, another one comes through.

“Everything after last night just left me more confused that ever…”

And confused myself, I read every last hateful word from the night before until I am unshakeable.  And all I do is copy, word for word, the final text I sent before I turned off the phone.

“If you are confused, allow me to clarify.  By the time I come home, I want all of your things out of my house.  I want you to put your keys on the table by the door, and I want you to leave, and never, ever come back.”

He tells me he can’t get there.  He tells me this, he tells me that.  He gives a thousand reasons and excuses but he has a functioning car and his crap in my home so he’d better remove it.  I ignore him.  Travis illegally downloads Catching Fire so I can watch it since my bent up body doesn’t allow me to sit in theater chairs, and surprisingly it turns out that movies where lots of people die can be hard to watch after you’ve just suffered a major loss.  I cry, then say it’s a great movie, then cry, then say I love Lenny Kravitz, then cry some more.

Enough people have died in the film at this point that I’m starting to lose it.  I ask Travis to pause the movie and he does.  He has me covered in blankets with a heater straight on me, but I’m still shivering.  He comes over to pat my back as I cover my face with my hands and start to sob.  The hateful words said to me.  The loss of love I thought would last.  The disintegration of everything I planned around me all over again.  And it’s only because I’m so broke and vulnerable, only because I’ve been ripped up one side and down the other, only because my nerves are raw and my heart is bleeding and my dreams are crushed, do I suddenly whisper in his hear what I’ve been stuffing into corners, hiding under cheerfulness and positive platitudes, afraid to say out loud to anyone for the last nine months.

“Jon died.  Jon died.  I could die too.”

“I’m scared.”

And he holds me.  He holds me like a good friend would.