The Next Time I Fall

I admit I cried a few times in my life:
When my cat died.
That time I lost the election for class secretary.
And a few minutes after the death of my girlfriend.

Well, no, she didn’t die, she just moved to another state and, just before she did, she decided it was would be a great idea to let three guys jam their tongues down her throat and probably a few other locations, per the text message I received that late night.

Thankfully, there were no pictures as I would have wanted to kill everyone involved.
I had thoughts, however, that it was all a ruse. Maybe one to soften the blow of breaking up and never seeing her again. A way to make sure we had no connection to one another that we could hang on to. Nothing that I would want to happily share with anyone. That story could only be shared at a time where I was drunk. We’re talking sad and depressed drunk, not life of the party drunk.

But why create such a story in the age of Facebook? I mean. We. Still. Could. Have. Talked!
Facebook messenger, woman!

So, instead off just telling me that a long-distance relationship was impossible and that she refused to FaceTime or some sexting, she closed her Facebook account and her cell number was disconnected.
Maybe I would have felt even more pain if she had done that. It was hard to tell during the time as I threw my cell phone across the room where it struck a framed movie poster of “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” I had on my wall.
Had, being the definite word as the phone struck the glass, shattering it and causing the heavy frame to fall off the wall and onto the phone.

Two days and two hundred dollars later I had my phone repaired and I stared at that text.
I stared at that text like it was an enigma code to decipher: to try and find out why she would leave on those terms. What had I done to piss her off?
Or what had I not done to keep her attention?

I listened to her.
I took her suggestions on places to go.
I will say that I was the most obedient boyfriend that a teenage girl could ever have.
No, I was not “whipped”—as we hadn’t even had sex yet.
Yes, I would be lying if I said I didn’t want it. There were times when I wanted to slowly undress her during one of our kissing sessions.
But I admit I was afraid to take it any farther and she never really really gave any hints. She never moved my hands to signal me.
I may have misread some signals.

“Yep, you sure did.”
“Thank you, Bryce.”
“You can thank me tomorrow when you pay me back the fifty you borrowed.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I replied as I threw a bag of dog food onto the shelf.

I chose to throw myself into my work, as it made the most the sense in my time of loss. Bryce was the first person I told. And by told I meant that I paced back and forth in his room, ranting about what I found out what had happened until I finally broke down in tears.

He was there when my cat died, so seeing me like that wasn’t anything new.

“There are more girls in the world you know, right?”
“Yes, I do,” I replied as we hoisted two forty pounds bags onto the lower shelf. “But it took a long time to get to know Amber.
“Maybe that was the issue.”
“How?”
“Don’t get to know her. Just jump in. You know, deep end and all.”
“I’d like to think up some corresponding analogy to that.”
“Let me know after lunch if you have anything.”

I plodded away from the pet food aisle to the back room where in the past, I would take out my phone and text back and forth with Amber. I regret I both still love and hate that name. Even a song like “America the Beautiful” is tainted by that word. Walking by the beer aisle and seeing “Amber Ale” made me feel like going into a Tasmanian devil frenzy or throwing myself onto the floor in a weeping heap of my former self.

I sat at the end of one of the long tables in the break room and stared at the wall for a few seconds before taking out my phone and staring at the blank screen for a few more seconds or maybe a few minutes, it was hard to tell as I concentrated on the face stating back at me with its pathetic and depressed look. I may not have had it all: I still didn’t have a car or a license and hey, maybe that was yet another pock mark on our relationship: I was not able to deliver the goods on any front it would seem. I was trying to build everything up. I had my eyes on a used Jeep for sale up the road but I had to work for it and work meant less free time and less free time meant that I couldn’t go to parties and couldn’t see that interesting make-out session first hand.
“Maybe it’s on the “worldstar” website,” I thought to myself but then shook my head and put my phone back into my pocket.

“I got nothing,” I replied to Bryce as I met up with him in the paper products aisle.
“You sure did.”
“That’s funny. Thank you.”
Bryce lifted up a large box of paper towels and shoved it my way.
“Just trying to help.”
“You can help by trying to find Amber.”
“Why?”
I opened the box and took out a few rolls.
“I want closure.”
“I would have assumed that text was closure enough.”
“I would like to talk to her about it and not over text I or messenger.”
“Talk or stalk?”
“A little of both, maybe,” I replied as I hastily stacked the two rolls and then grabbed more out of the box.
“That’s what she wants you to do: get you out of your element. It’s like a war game, you know? She’s fired the first shot and you assume that it was an accident. What she did was not an accident. There is no accidental thing about it. You just need to leave her in the past. Mistakes were made.”
“Exactly, mistakes were made.”
“Not on your part,” Bryce replied with his voice stepping up a notch.
“I didn’t buy her a flower that week before it happened.”
“Flowers die.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“Neither does she and if she’s supposed to be treated as an “equal” to a man then she should be making some money and maybe buy you a bouquet.”
“I’ve never been given flowers.”
“It’s a nice sentiment.”

I nodded and then broke the cardboard box down in order to move on to the next one. Amazingly, the store was not too crowded for a Sunday night. I kind of wanted to stay at work all night, into the next day, and forego going back to school ever again. I had lasted about two weeks without Amber but the thought of being without her gnawed on me each day as there was no one waiting for me after class except for Bryce—who wouldn’t care if I put my arm around his shoulder, but understood that I was’t going to do that.
“Robert sent me flowers once. They were nice.”
“I recall.”
“Purple roses. The flower of mystical attraction. Too bad that power doesn’t hold.” Bryce replied while biting his lip.
Bryce said little about their break-up at first. He assumed I didn’t want to hear about it and he was right to a point, but, I did listen to his short rant about “Bobby”. He took everything that he was given by “Bob” out to the backyard, meticulously stacked it up, and then set it ablaze. This included a PlayStation 3 that I was sure was just being borrowed.
“Stella gonna get her groove back,” is all he said as everything went up in a nice flame.
Robert went to another school a few miles away so Bryce never saw him during school but they were together every other time of the day—excluding work—and Robert refused to come into the store and told Bryce that he shouldn’t work there either. That was the only issue they had at first. I never asked Bryce what happened between them that lead to a Viking funeral of their relationship but it had to have been either epic or incredibly sad. Like a mix of Star Wars and Titanic, I suppose.