June, 1994

So I sat there, knees pulled up into my chest, long hair spilling down over my face, resting my head on my kneecaps. I was sitting in the pantry of our apartment on the floor, looking across the room at our Salvation Army dining room set, where a black felt box sat on a pink receipt, bright and cheerful. Mocking me.

I didn’t even have a good song playing in the background. There wasn’t any cool rotating jib pull-out to reveal the visual depths of my solitude. I didn’t punch walls or flip over furniture or go into a good “Hulk Smash” routine where I pull a Van Halen and send my TV crashing into the parking lot one floor below. Too many bushed down there for a decent crash, anyway.

There was just me, and the fast beeping of the telephone telling me get up off my ass and hang up the phone. But I couldn’t do it. Not only could I not move, but I couldn’t think about hanging up the phone. Because that would be admitting it was over. That my idea of a perfect little life was down the shitter with one call.

It sucks getting dumped. It sucks more getting dumped via telephone. But I’m pretty sure  get some kind of prize for the level of suck involved in getting dumped via telephone by your fiance’s best fucking friend that called and said “Sherry called me. She told me to tell you not to buy the ring.”

And just like that shit became really fucked up. My roommate came home an indeterminate time later and found me in the pantry. She didn’t say anything, just sat there in the pantry with me and held while I shook, cried, cursed and begged for answers. She didn’t have any, either, except to say “I’m here.”

Eventually I got up off the floor. Eventually I put all her shit in a box and when she got back from digging up relics in the Middle East for her summer internship I gave all her crap back to her on a lunch break from working a concert. Eventually I met someone else, fell in love and got married. Eventually I started to write again. Eventually I reconnected with some of what she ripped out of me, poured gasoline on, burned to a crisp and then salted the earth from where it sprung.

But that night, while I looked across my kitchen at the engagement ring I had bought for her that day, I couldn’t see eventually. The world had gone monochrome for me, and I sat there remembering changing her tire for her after freshman Western Civ class, catching 3AM Taco Bell after sitting in the amphitheatre on campus talking until past 2AM on our first date, eating Little Debbie Star Crunches naked on my bed while her red hair trailed over her breasts like a modern day Godiva with ringlet curls. All those memories went from vibrant to sepia in a second while I felt something deep within me die.

It took ten years for me to write anything again, and two more to write that story. She burned out something inside me that took a long time to grow back, but there are a few buds beginning to sprout in that wasteland lately. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with my life, but some hurts take a long, long time to heal, and the scars last a long time, no matter how great the condition of the rest of your body. Or soul.