Life Happens

The Break Up

Prologue

This is the first in what is to be a series of short stories.
What prompted me to write these stories was not actually any kind of inner need to share or a desire to expose certain moments of my life. In fact, I don’t really like talking about myself for the most part. I am more of a fiction writer.
In the end it was a friend of mine who convinced me. Her work is often brilliant and always entertaining so I tend to take what she says under advisement. So we are sitting at a bar having a few drinks and celebrating her most recent publication when we began discussing the old writer’s guideline of “Write what you know”.
Then we discussed some fond memories in her life as happy drunks are often inclined to do. Some of these were things that she had written about or had used in her fictional stories. then we discussed some events in my life as well. As the conversation wore on I began to suspect that she was rapidly losing interest in what I was saying because she began to comment less and less. But what was really happening was that she was so stunned by the things I was saying and the “cavalier” manner in which I was presenting these stories that she began to be drawn in. That was her word not mine. By the end of the discussion she was asking me why I had not written about these things.

My response was simple. I didn’t believe these events to be all that uncommon. I said something to the effect of “I just thought these kinds of things happen to everyone. I mean they may not talk about them in polite conversation but everyone has things like this happen don’t they?”
She stared at me in disbelief and simply said “No. No, they do not.” In a very matter of fact tone.

So what follows is the first and the stories may not follow any chronological order. In fact’ they will likely be randomly arranged.

“The Breakup”

NOTE: I’m going to tell this story with all of the accuracy and honesty I can. Every scrap and stitch of what follows is true. Every detail is exactly as I remember it. As a result, there may be moments when the reader is going to feel some measure of animosity toward the writer and possibly even question said writers sanity or at least the mental stability (or lack thereof ) I had at that given moment. I do not contest your right to do so.
Upon reflection I have struggled with my own thoughts and emotions about that day and nothing will be said or thought by any reader that has not already been covered at length in my own mental reconciliations. So judge as you will. That is the nature of humans in modern society. I mean have you ever heard of social media? It’s just one big judge-fest. I do not seek absolution nor do I require approval of any man woman or child. It is just a story for the sake of telling the story. So enough said.

 

All guys have a first serious girlfriend and a first serious break up. This usually happens when we are in our early to mid-teens and the rules bore no exception for me. Like most of my peers I wanted to move out of my parent’s house and get my own place as quickly as I could. At seventeen I had taken a job in the nearest city of any size and in no time I had my first apartment with my best friend David. And Spartan as it may have been I could not have been happier with it. A certain freedom comes with that first severance of the umbilical. And our new virtually empty apartment was the first truly tangible sign of that. As time passed I a pattern began to emerge. One that confused and alarmed me. The girl I had been dating for about a year was slowly and methodically positioning herself closer and closer to me. In the beginning it seemed to be just good luck. She had become friends with two girls who were in my close circle and had eventually moved into a new apartment with them just up the street from us. Then she began hanging out with my male friends. First in a group then one on one. Pretty soon she was showing up at our place at all hours with different people and exhibiting an increasingly bizarre behavior. One night she would come into our place with a group of people and completely ignore me. The next time she would go off on me about not talking to her. I was a pretty tolerant boyfriend. So much so in fact that my friends had to tell me what an idiot I was for not seeing what was going on right in front of me. It is a unique feeling to think you have a pretty good handle on what’s going on in the world around only to discover that you are truly and genuinely oblivious to the obvious. I had always thought that the mature thing to do was to just trust the person you were with. I had seen my sister go through a lot of possessive boyfriends and I saw up close how a woman reacts to guys who smother their girlfriends. But I was young and naïve. I had zero real world experience with women and simply didn’t see the fact that people were laughing at me behind my back. I didn’t take what was coming lightly. I took about a week to think about what I should do.
Only then did I reflect on the night I met her and what had happened. If this turns out to be an interesting story and people want to hear more I will elaborate on that crazy story another time.

Part two

So everything had been coming to a gradual head over the course of the previous months and my final decision was that I needed to get as far away from this girl as I possibly could. I had also come to the conclusion that no matter how much I didn’t want to I had to break up with her face to face. Somehow I had gotten it into my head that I owed her that. In retrospect I cannot even imagine how that particular notion had gained such weight in my mind. In my early teen years, I had developed this romantic ideology about nobility and honor regardless of the circumstances.
Either way I found myself standing at her door in a kind of foggy detached state of mind. It was one of those oblivious almost out of body moments when your eyes lock on no particular object or space then blur a bit and you find yourself residing within your own mind as the immediate physical periphery and surrounding spaces fades away into that same out of focus state where even time slides out of existence and you are left with nothing more than your thoughts. Within this introspective place I realized I had absolutely no recollection of the drive over due to an overwhelming preoccupation with the impending moment that was obviously approaching far faster than my mind could work. I was on a type of preprogrammed auto pilot while driving. And why not, I had made the drive countless times and so it didn’t really require any conscious form of elevated awareness. But one minute I was leaving my apartment and the next I was standing at her door. I suddenly felt a wave of concerned amazement for a couple of reasons. One was that it felt like that level of distraction could have been dangerous but secondly and more concerning was that I could allow myself to be so swept up in a problem or situation that I could actually even enter such a frighteningly vulnerable state of mind. But standing there in that quasi hypnotic moment of self-discovery and unwanted enlightenment I had more control and I forced that self-analysis to the back of the line. It was something I could dwell on later. For now, I had to address the more immediate situation. One dumpster fire at a time I thought. Not to mention the question of what if someone sees me standing here in what to any onlooker would appear to be a drug induced stupor. What if I looked like I was drooling on myself? Was I drooling on myself? I thought. Deep down I knew I wasn’t but as I snapped myself out of it I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth to make sure. I thought it might have been like those times when you nodded off in class or on the couch and you come to ten minutes later to find yourself going “Ewe, oh God” as you realize what you’ve done and you start franticly wiping it away with your hand or a part of your shirt. But though I had no recollection of the trip itself I do remember the mock scenarios I was running over and over in my mind trying to prepare for what was coming. Every possible response to every conceivable question or statement or action. My mind had even strayed into variables such as the sudden introduction of another person. Maybe one of her roommates would come home in the middle of what was obviously going to be an uncomfortable situation at the very least. I had no illusions about the fact that it would be a difficult situation with at least some crying and quite possibly some yelling. And I do recall a brief internal struggle with myself as to why it was even important to do this in person. Maybe I could call. Maybe a letter left on the door or better yet mailed from the faraway place I had suddenly moved to. Yes! I thought excitedly. I will just move to New York or maybe LA. Better yet Hong Kong. Maybe an email….no wait, those don’t exist yet. It would’ve been great if I could’ve just changed my facebook status. But Mark Zuckerber was still wetting the bed. But in the end I felt like all other options were cowardly and I needed to be a man. And boy was I a fucking idiot as a teenager. So I thought I was prepping and covering all the bases. That in itself reveals the depths of my ignorance at that time.
All that preparation would go out the window in the space of a few seconds. It would be a life lesson in the immutable truth that such situations cannot be predicted, controlled or scripted. And what was really about to happen was so far beyond all of the pedestrian little scenarios running around through my fairly limited imagination that it would find me struggling to respond like a child in the face of a house fire.

 

I don’t know how much time passed while I was standing there tripping the light fantastic. But, it passed and I snapped myself out of it. I knocked and she answered fairly quickly. She smiled and I moved through the doorway with residual traces of my daze clinging tenaciously to my brain like a lingering smoky ephemera. She went over to sit down on the sofa and motioned for me to sit with her. “No, I can’t stay,” I said dryly. I looked around “Kristy and Kelly out?” She nodded. She clued in pretty quickly. On some level she had to have known that all the shit she had pulled would eventually come back around to bite her in the ass and she may have been waiting for the inevitability of this day all along.
I didn’t want to waste any more time. At that age I felt like I had already lost a pretty sizable chunk of my life to what had turned out to be empty senseless relationships. “I think we need to break up Rena. I’ve been thinking pretty hard about this and in the end it always comes back to this.” Without going into a lot of detail she did not respond well to that statement. First came disbelief. An unwillingness to even process the words and absorb their meaning. That, all too quickly and abruptly shifted to a the much higher gear of flat out pissed. A few harsh words and like a scene from a movie set in the high risk wing of a hospital for the criminally insane she snapped to a soft wounded voice. Even her body language turned on a dime to match her tone. A fair amount of crying and the reemergence of her unwillingness to accept what was happening followed. A lot of back and forth, some yelling but not much. I’m really not certain how long this went on but was enough that I had to excuse myself for a bathroom break.
For an instant I imagined that someone new had arrived during my brief absence because I heard a voice that was eerily childlike and my mind simply did not recognize it. It was unfamiliar in the worst possible way. I came out of the bathroom and moved out of the hallway and back into the area between the living room and the dining area. Whimpering softly the flowing voice came from my right. As I turned my head I noticed that the apartment had grown much darker. Again the voice emerged from the shadowed area near the front door. The voice quavered with a tone that disturbed me. It had not sounded like her at all. More like a young girls’ plea for help. I was cursing the fact that the three women who lived in this apartment felt it necessary to have a vanity mirror lined with hundred watt bulbs that lit the tiny bathroom up like the fucking sun because now my eyes wouldn’t adjust to the darkness. I think she must’ve known that when I came out of the bathroom I was going to forego any further pointless debate and just leave. I couldn’t have been gone for more than two minutes but when I stepped back into that room with her I was to discover that a whole lot of shit can happen in the time it takes to go take a piss. I glanced over to the couch kind of expecting her to still be sitting in the same spot.
But all that was there was the sweater she had been wearing. I remember it was an elegant looking loose knit white sweater and one of sleeves drooped over the edge of the sofa and down to the floor. An instant later I heard a cracked dry whimpering voice near the door.
“I’m so sorry…. I’m so sorry….” The hitching in her chest kept her in a state of gasping and irregular breaths between syllables. She had dimmed this light so that the only light in the apartment was the muted afternoon sun pouring through the sliding glass doors behind the sofa where her sweater now rested. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust from the bright bathroom lights to the now darkened foyer area where she was standing. She had her back pressed against the front door slightly bent forward in an almost bowing posture. Both hands appeared to be placed against the door palms down and it hit me that she had placed herself in a position that would prevent me from easily leaving.
She must have known what I was thinking because I had seriously considered walking out when I came out of the bathroom. I felt as if everything of importance had been said and anything more would be simply dragging out the painful moment for both of us. Her head was hanging down and her face was hidden by waves of chestnut hair. Then she raised her head to meet my gaze. I had never seen an expression so mired in sorrow. confusion and pain. It was a distorted facial expression that seemed to remove all of the familiar facial landscapes that had become so deeply ingrained in my mind as features that had made her so beautiful to me in the beginning. She was unfamiliar to me in this state as if this were a different person who had come in while I was out of the room. Her customarily heavy mascara had begun to disintegrate under what had become a torrent of tears. Dark blackness ran down her face in smeared blotches. And the tears flowed in streaked rivulets marked in that same black as they carried the cosmetic away on their downward path. If I had seen her at some random location, I wouldn’t have known who she was. Her hair had even changed somehow, it was disheveled and askew on her head in a very unnatural way. Like a bad wig that had been put on sideways. She continued with the same tone but a lot of her words had descended into some unintelligible repetitious muttering. I couldn’t understand anything but “sorry”, “didn’t mean it” and “please”. Only one other word uttered through those trembling lips was clear enough to understand and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. “Forgive me!” Everything instantly came into focus. “God No. What did you do?” My heart had begun pounding and my mind raced and as if to answer my question two thin almost black streams of a viscous yet freely flowing liquid trailed down the door behind her. I stared at the dual streams in disbelief as they grew in length in front of me. They seemed to take on a life of their own as they flowed in and out of the common Arcadian pattern of the front door. Following their path not because of the physical elements related to surface friction or the texture of the door itself, but because they wanted to. And they did not slow because they were being constantly replenished by the steady flow from the point of origin.
The rivulets of blood quickly reached the floor and began to pool in thick concentric circular puddles on the tile of the entryway. It’s hard for me to recall each and every singular thought and emotion that was rushing in on me in those first few seconds. The most obvious emotion was the most powerful. Fear. But it intermingled with so many others and each followed in succession adding itself to the mix. Disbelief, sorrow, empathy regret for not having seen this coming and even a level of initial panic. Many thought feelings vied for the top spot within me and each one took its turn. But the singular most powerful emotion was about to rain thunderously down on me.
All at once it rushed through me as the absolute dominant response to this overwhelming and unbelievable situation. In the forefront of my mind where logic rules supremely I was desperately trying to cling to the idea of the right response. That logic told me that pity and kindness were the most appropriate and any subsequent action must follow along that path. These things would be called for in handling an emotionally unstable and clearly hurt young woman who was having difficulty processing and reacting to the situation in which she currently found herself. This was a civil, logical and appropriate human response. That sounds good and sometimes I wished that is what happened.
But it isn’t. Sometimes life is messy and sometimes the better version of ourselves that we convince ourselves is there in the mirror looking back at us every morning does not step forward when we wished that it would. I needed that reflection at this moment. And though I would find over the course of my life that he was very real and would do me proud on numerous occasions at this moment he was elusive. Ephemeral and unattainable. A phantasm born of a need to see the best in ourselves. I don’t think I have ever met anyone who wouldn’t change something in their past given the chance. A bad choice, A misspoken word, a simple regret. None of us wants to see the darkness within but the truth is that it dwells within all of us. It is opportunistic and it is not discriminating or subtle. And we feed it most of the time we don’t even know we are giving it what it needs. We are too busy feeling what the moment has thrust into our life at that moment it grows. Rapidly gaining strength. A force of nature. Like a flash flood. You barely even notice that it is raining or that your clothes were getting wet when you get swept up in a torrent so powerful that when it takes you off your feet and pulls you and under they don’t find your body until a week later ten miles away. And there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop it. When my mind got a firm grasp on her motivation, her self-serving reasoning my darkness tore through its cage doors and roared to the surface. Pain hatred, anger, frustration. These things broke my already tenuous grasp on those feelings of concern, empathy and pity and they fell away into the ether of blackness consuming me. An all-consuming blackness had me in its grip for the first time in my life. Everything she had put me through, all of the lies, the infidelity, the humiliation and embarrassment, even the little stuff like talking about me behind my back all of it fed the darkness. “You selfish psychotic bitch.” I coldly spoke as I walked toward her. I grabbed her arms forcing her to bring them forward. She didn’t fight it. In fact, she relented quickly. I rolled both forearms simultaneously and exposed her wrists. I honestly don’t know what I was expecting to see but the wounds were far worse than I imaged. Both cuts stretched laterally a few centimeters from the heel of the palm. I had no significant medical knowledge at the time but they looked very deep and they were laid open wide enough that the outer edges of each cut seemed to curl up and outward from the center. These were  self-inflicted wounds and for an instant I was locked into the impossible effort of answering the question, How in the hell could you force yourself to cut the second wrist after seeing what you had done to the first? Once again by default I was trying to apply my own rational thought to another persons irrational action in some vain attempt to find a comfortable, understandable answer that I could wrap my mind around. My monochromatic, pedestrian, plodding myopic adolescent mind. But that answer still to this day hasn’t come in any satisfactory form. The next thing that hit me was the sensation of the cold blood that coated my palms as I gripped her forearms. A viscous sticky substance I had never seen or felt in such a large volume. A faint metallic odor wafted upward between us but by the time I had noticed it I was already pulling her across the room back toward the couch. I was walking backwards as I pulled her forward and when we neared the couch I spun around and in a powerful slingshot snap I threw her to the sofa. “You manipulative selfish bitch.” I seethed as I reached up to my shoulder. Gripping the fabric firmly at the top of my arm I ripped the sleeve away from the shirt. I didn’t feel like there was time to go looking around for a fist aid kit or to find an alternate source for the long tourniquet style bandage I knew I would need. A long shirt sleeved seemed a viable solution in the moment. After ripping both sleeves off I gripped one of her wrists and tied it off as tightly as I thought was safe and in turn did the same for the other wrist. No more than a half a second passed before I found my right hand wrapped tightly around her throat I squeezed just hard enough to make it very hard for her to breathe. And though I was in the grip of a horrifying rage I recall exactly what I said. Gritting my teeth then croaking from a tight dry throat I asked the question that was lodged in my chest “Do you really what to die Renee?” She was grasping at my forearm with both hands trying to break my grip. But at that moment there was no hope of that. She managed to gurgle out that very short very succinct response that I already knew. “No”. “Are you sure, because we can end this for real right here and now. Lights out and all the pain goes away. Isn’t that what you wanted? Isn’t that what you were trying to do?” “No please.” She croaked still gasping for air and pulling at my wrist. Her face had taken on a deep red tone. I immediately let go. Though I had known the answer to the question well before I asked it her response still flamed the already out of control flames. She had just admitted that she mutilated herself in a life threatening way simply to manipulate me and to get her way. That’s when I noticed that one of the makeshift tourniquets was no longer white and had soaked through to a dark crimson. It wasn’t holding and to make matters worse I was relatively certain that the reason it wasn’t holding was that I just forced her to attempt to break free from what she perceived as mortal danger. So she had fought against it with everything she had though everything she had was seriously diminished from blood loss. I had just risked killing her to make a point and the realization struck me that it was no different than what she had just done to me. The irony did not escape me. Looking back on it knowing what I know now I can honestly say that total blood loss was easily between a half and a whole pint. That dark hue of red had quickly disappeared.
Her waxen parlor grew to a chalky, pale, and sickly appearance. She looked exhausted as her very lifes blood had drained away and her limp frame seemed to just sink into the couch. Finally grasping the full weight of the situation and pushing my anger off to the side for a moment I realized I needed help. Now I was starting to worry about her going into shock. I franticly reached for the phone sitting on the end table. “I’m calling 911” I said as my fingers smeared her blood all over the numbers and the receiver. At that moment her frail diminutive figure that was losing strength by the second erupted into a panicked animal driven by a new and deeply ingrained fear whose sole purpose was to stop that call from being placed come hell or high water. “Nooo! ” She screamed dragging the word out into a disturbingly eerie fusion of a high pitch screech and an almost guttural growling vowel sound as she snatched the phone from my hand. Clutching it with both hands and holding it tightly to her chest. In an unnaturally depraved way she looked like a small child devoid of reason or rationale who has absolutely no intention of sharing her new toy with any of the other kids. Her frame was rigid and she retreated drawing her body in tightly to the sofa. Assuming a shockingly guarded posture accentuated with the same look of penetrating terror. Her eyes were wide with a new sense of panic and fear that made the previous five minutes look like a casual dress rehearsal. As if the previous performance had only been the lead in to this new and much more unhinged finale.
“Ranee, you need medical attention. I have to either call an ambulance or at the very least drive you to the emergency room. Now just give me the phone and I’ll call your mom.” I only thought she had reacted badly when I said 911 but the M word released an entirely new personality. A twisted expression of pain and anger contorted her face and she stood up abruptly on the sofa with the same hard stance. “Wow, she is really not taking suggestions in a very constructive manner now is she?” I thought. That musing notion had no more passed out of mind when the cordless hand set to which she had so tenaciously clung had become airborne. I was actually kind of startled by the sheer force she put into it as it flew across the room shattering against the living room wall a few feet behind me. The state of shocked confusion that was becoming uncomfortably familiar once again emerged in full. Being the naive inexperienced young man that I was it only hit me at that moment that this had clearly gone way beyond the poor reaction to a break up. She was acting like a woman possessed. She was exhibiting behavior more akin to someone fighting for their very survival. Had she always been this crazy and I just didn’t see it? Or was all of this some brand new disorder, some newly emerged mania, a freshly birthed delusional paranoia or schizophrenia? Doubtful I thought. I knew myself too well. I was keenly aware of my own myopic perspective. But whether it was my long standing state of denial or the emergence of some new emotional dysfunction for her result was exactly the same. In the minutes that followed I discovered her response to the phone was not without its foundation in reason. When confronted with the possibility of this living drama in which we were the starring players she was overwhelmed with a flood of horrifying memories. Images of a time before my arrival in her life. A time in which a 14-year-old girl who became pregnant, was forced to give up the child for adoption, suffered postpartum depression and subsequently attempted to take her own life. All of which resulted in an uncomfortably lengthy stay in an institution for the less than emotionally stable. A time and place that had irrevocably left its mark on her psyche. The thought of once again being forcibly committed to any same such facility was far beyond any coping tools or mechanisms she was equipped with. Once my mind had digested these facts my demeanor changed and I reassured her that we would deal with the wounds ourselves and that the events that had unfolded in that apartment on that day would remain forever hidden form those would seek to send her away again. Without leaving her alone for very long I gathered the items I would need to tend to her violently self-inflicted wounds to the best of my ability and waited with her until her friend and roommate had returned home and I could be reasonably assured that she was in no danger and that she would no longer seek to harm herself. I left and went back to my apartment where I spent the brief remainder of the day solemnly alone in my room until I went to bed. I did not eat that day. I shut my bedroom door and pulled up a chair near the window where I sat in silence staring out the window and reflecting on the decisions made and the actions taken for better or worse.
I wondered what the long term implications and consequences for those decisions might ultimately become, I still don’t have those answers.

Chapter 2 Beware the riteousness

 I have spent far too much time procrastinating on this chapter. Mostly due to horrific nature of the content and partially the conflict of how it needed to be told. I finally decided to simply get to it. In 1987 I was a junior in high school and and once again my head and heart were filled with concepts like honor, nobility and defending the weak or those who cannot defend themselves. The world was extremely black and white. Though as teenagers we have that luxury. Throughout my junior year I had been developing a friendship with a person who would be my best friend by the end of the school year. We can call him Wayne. I had already been friends with his older brother (let's just call him George) for some time but had never met Wayne at that time. My first impressions upon seeing them together for the first time was that no two men could ever be more diametrically opposed. North and south poles of the same magnet. One with blonde hair one with bron. One with a stocky build and one tall and slim. One meticulous and uptight the other relaxed and carefree. I liked them both. They both spoke to and complimented aspects of my own personality. But then I was pretty tightly wound myself in those days and actually all over the freaking map in that ever evolving quest of teenagers to find out who they are and to establish an identity as an individual.. 

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