excerpt from mi novella

When I came to, I was laying on my stomach on my bed, in my dark, dirty and dingy bedroom. I reached beside me, and grabbed my phone to take a quick observance of what hour of the day I was arising to. 4:57 pm. How had it gotten so late? What was going on? Then, I was reminded that I had worked the morning shift. This was just a nap I was rising from.

My phone had 2 missed calls and 2 text messages waiting for me. The lot of them were all from Girlfriend. The first text said “We need to talk” and the latter said simply “today”. An uneasy feeling overtook my stomach, and a dull throb began to flinch in my chest. I didn’t need any hints or clues to realize what was going to happen the second I walked across the lot and to her apartment. I had known that this afternoon and this conversation were looming over my head like the Grim Reaper in an Intensive Care Unit for quite some time. Maybe, even since the entire relationship had begun.

I debated on texting, calling, or just walking over for several minutes. I partnered my debate with my wretched smoking habit outside on my patio. With each drag I took in, I realized that my last breath while being in her life was nearing. I held in my hand a black frame that housed a picture of the two of us during happy times. Both our smiles were so genuine, both smiles as wide as an ocean basin, both faces lit up like the sky on the 4th of July.

“How was I am going to do this without her?” a faint voice said in the back of my head. The sky was completely décored in clouds as gray as the hair of an elder deacon in a southern Baptist church. I wanted to listen to music, but knew there was not a song in the world that I wanted to pair with the piece of life I was about to take a bite out of. I knew that this day would live in infamy for me, I knew the upcoming hour would make the grey sky look as bright as supernova exploding through a pinhole sky. I wanted no song to carry this, I wanted this memory to be held in silence.

I didn’t call or text, instead just walked to her apartment. When I arrived at her door, I stood outside of it for at least five minutes. I wanted to keep myself as composed as possible, because I didn’t want to come off looking weak to her. Not at first anyway. I wanted to walk in confident and sure. I wanted to channel dam-like strength in my eyes, to keep my cheekbones from becoming a spillway.

I didn’t knock, instead just let myself in, and I heard her voice call from the back bedroom. She was sitting at her computer desk, and her face was painted by the brush of apathy. Her eyes lazily glazed over me, and she let out a casual “hey” in my direction. The very informal nature of her greeting was like a knife into my heart. Her mind was already made up. The judge and jury had already reached a verdict and no matter how incredible my opening statement or fillabuster would be- it didn’t matter.

I think this certainty became more granite in my mind as the silence between the two of us began to fill the room. I sat on the floor beside her desk chair, and laid my head in her lap. She didn’t resist or attempt to move it. She just let me rest my head there. A tear began to swell in my right eye, and I felt a hole break through my damn. It ran onto her leg, but fortunately she was wearing jeans and could not possibly feel my drop of pain through her denim shield.

She ran her hand across my head, and patted it in a soothing manner, but as comforting as she wanted to make it- the emotion that I wanted to feel was no longer coming out of her fingertips. It was a much friendlier sensation, her heals were no longer anywhere close to her head.

I felt that ache in my chest begin to swell from its original size. It began to grow exponentially with each passing moment. I have long heard that right before you die, you see your entire life flash before your eyes. In those moments, as my chest hurt worse, and my stomach clinched tighter- I saw every minute that I had ever spent with her rush through my head. Everything from singing Jo-Jo to her in the car, to our nights in Dallas. I was reliving fights, love making, valentine’s, new year’s, birthday’s, crush events, movies we had seen, and tears I had made her cry all at the same time. The pool of emotion I was swimming in was so deep, that I could not see the bottom.

She didn’t rush our conversation. She just let the moment develop as naturally as a child in womb. My memories were serving as a placenta and my nervous system as an umbilical cord to what was becoming an inevitable break down. I couldn’t decide how I was feeling.

Our relationship had been far from happy for at least a month. All of the rich flavor that we both used to taste from eachother had been replaced by a bitter array of sensations that rivaled a beer that had been left out in the sun for four or five hours. I had seen her heart lose all hope she had for me and us over the past four weeks. I hadn’t even made an attempt to cease that in her. I couldn’t. I was completely defeated in my own self.

I continued to sit there, with my head in her lap, but enough time had passed where she felt it time to begin the ending process. Her voice was sharp and pointed, and had the force of a sharp pair of shears cutting away at what few weak strands of strength I was holding onto.

“Why had I not just loved her? Why had I not once in 2 months shown her what she meant to me? How did I get so wrapped up in my depression?” The thoughts were flying through my head at a rapid enough pace that a sub-machine gun may as well have been firing them off. I listened as she explained how miserable she was, and I couldn’t help but begin a deep self-loathing for knowing I had been the cause of it.

“Does misery love company, or is misery the company of love?” this became the next starting point for the thoughts that would run through my head. “Will it always be this way? Were we just not right for each other? Was I just too self-absorbed? Did I really love her, or was this like an addiction? If I loved her, wouldn’t I not have put myself in a position to ever lose her? Did I not know how to love someone? Was it this? Was it something else? Will this make me happier? Will I get through this?” The thoughts got increasingly louder with each passing interrogative phrase. I sat back on my haunch, then laid face down on the floor beside her chair.

She continued on with her explanation of why things were happening like they were, but she didn’t have to tell me any of this. I knew what it was. She might as well have been reciting to me basic multiplication tables or directions to my parents house. I had spent the previous six weeks writing the script to what she was saying.

I laid there, face down on her floor. Two silver dollar sized spots began to show on her carpet, from the salty liquid that was pouring from my eyes. I just stayed there. I didn’t want her to know that she was capable of affecting me like that. I had not shown her through the relationship, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let this be the first time for that.

Even though I knew every drop of reasoning she had, with the more upset I got, the more my defense mechanisms began to kick in. I began to stop the crying by building up an accusational attack on Girlfriend. I dried my eyes off, raised off the ground, and for the first time since my arrival I began to speak.

“How could you do this to me? You know that I need you. You know that you are the reason I made it through school. I’m not capable of this with out you. You KNOW that. You know I will collapse! How can you let someone you ‘love’ go like that? You are abandoning me! That’s it! You are completely leaving me! Just like Mama. The exact same thing…” I kept on going for minutes, and as each phrase was finished, a new loaded one entered the chamber…”You aren’t even upset about this are you? You don’t care at ALL! You are heartless! Who are you? Who have I spent the last year of my life with?”

Its amazing how mean someone can become. Its amazing how quickly I transformed into such a ghastly creature. It wasn’t that I blamed her though. It was because I was hurt that she seemed so ambivalent about the entire situation. She was supposed to care. She had always cared.

I guess the interesting thing about caring though, is if you don’t feed and nurture the source of the caring, it will eventually die of famine. That is what had happened here. It had starved and become too parched to have any trace of hyrdration left in it. Rain can not fall from a sky that has no water. The reality came crashing back down on me again, and I bit my tongue and apologized.

I didn’t ask for her to take me back. I just told her how sorry I was for what I had just said. She told me she understood why I had said what I had, because she knew that she hurt me.

Oh my silly girlfriend. You didn’t hurt me. You never could have hurt me. You were to kind and generous to be able to manufacture pain in another. I had just cut you so deep, that the blade finally pierced me too. I’m so sorry Girlfriend, because I am the guilty party. I pulled the trigger that fired the bullet that killed us both.

I gave her a hug, and asked her if she wanted to smoke one last cigarette with me. We walked out on the back patio, and with each inhale, I now realized that I was free and had freed her from all of the pain that I had caused her. I still was in great pain, but it started to become even more evident that she was not the cause of it. It was my opinion of myself. None of anything that just happened, had anything to do with the way I felt about Girlfriend. Not a word that I said, not a thought that I had. It was all about me.

I still had no idea what I wanted to do. She knew exactly what she wanted, and even three days prior she was giving me the option of looking for places to live with her. When she was offering, I knew it never would happen, and I knew that it couldn’t, because if I really did love this girl- I couldn’t let her be with me at that point.

Yet, as I have said before, I couldn’t let myself leave her. I loved her too much, and loved being around her…even if she never knew it. I remember hearing my mother tell me once, that you never can love someone if you do not love yourself. That statement is false when translated the way that its constructed. The truth is buried further underneath the surface of those nouns and verbs.

Its not that you can’t love someone. Its that you can’t ever show it to them. When you dislike who you are, you can try your hardest to hide it as long as you can. You can wear a costume of confidence and happiness, but your true uniform is always right underneath it, like Superman’s suit. Just like the Man of Steel, if you look hard enough- its not too tough to see that the whole Clark Kent thing is just a charade.

Girlfriend never saw that I loved her, or how I loved her, because Girlfriend only saw the contempt I held for myself.

I finished my smoke at the same time she was taking the last pull off of her own. She put hers out in a wine bottle that was full to the mouth of ashed cigs, and I flicked mine across the yard into the dirt. I walked into her apartment and looked at her one last time.

“I really am sorry”
“I know” she responded.

I gave her a hug, then walked out the door. I made my way back across the parking lot and up the stairs to my apartment. I went back to my dingy bedroom, and buried my face in the pillow. The silver-dollar shaped puddles now appeared on my pillow. I closed my eyes in attempt to rebuild my dam once more. Sleep was still miles away.