A Very Short Song

Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad -
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.

-- Dorothy Parker

She stayed late at the office that night and threw all the jelly beans in the garbage. They hit the bottom of the garbage can with rapid fire clunks and she tried not to let her heart fall in after them.

As she pulled on her coat, the lip gloss she'd bought the night before slipped out of one of the pockets and fell to the floor. She stared at it, remembering the fifteen minutes she had spent in CVS agonizing over what shade to choose because maybe, just maybe, if the shade was right, he'd notice and she'd smile and then things would be okay again.

She kicked the tiny tube under the couch and left the office, flicking the lights off on her way out.

The car ride home was quiet and cold and she tried not to speed, but she was eleven miles over almost the entire way home. Her apartment only served to remind her that she was still alone and he wasn't. She didn't have enough furniture because she had let Roy keep most of it because she was tired of arguing with him over the phone about everything. During their last conversation she told him just where he should put all that furniture and hung up on him. He had the good sense not to call back. Two nights later she went to Wal*Mart and bought some of that furniture that you put together yourself. She drank half a bottle of wine and watched "The Princess Bride" while she screwed together her crappy new furniture and tried not to cry.

She couldn't blame him for not wanting to be alone because she's never wanted that, either. It was never so painfully obvious to her as it was on her first night in her apartment, when she had made enough spaghetti for two people out of habit. She had thrown the leftovers away because she couldn't even look at them without her breath catching in her throat. She slept in a bed that was too big and wandered around like the walking wounded in an apartment that was too small.

She shrugged off her coat and hung it on a hook then dropped her purse on the paint-stained braided rug near the door.

She put the tea kettle on, and when it whistled she tried not to hear all the words in its angry screeches. Each screech parroted back her inability to love him back and the hot steam reminded her of that muggy night, the night she broke two hearts with two words; broke herself with "I," him with "can't." They mixed painfully, like colors on her palette that became muddy and grim.

She moved the kettle to a cool burner so that the whistling would stop and she wouldn't have to hear anymore. The last words trapped in the kettle escaped as wisps of steam and disappeared into the air.

Hours later, when she crawled into bed alone, she wrapped her arms around her stomach and told herself that it hurt because of the tea. She wiped her tears away and told herself it would be okay, even though she wasn't sure of that at all. When she closed her eyes, she could only see them together - not her and him together, but him and her together, which was the worst sort of together of all the togethers.

She stared at the ceiling and tried not to think of all the what-ifs, but they floated through her mind like sinister butterflies. It was useless to wonder now, because she had made her choice and he had moved on. His feelings had changed. She was replaced by someone else - someone with tan skin and shiny hair and a perfect smile who knew what she wanted and did things that were scary and uncomfortable, like move to a new city to be with a man.

Now everything was scary and uncomfortable, like the time when she was twelve and had fallen off her uncle's sailboat into the ocean. She just swirled in the water, trying to decide what was up and what was down while her eyes burned. Her uncle had pulled her out then, but there was no one here to pull her from the uncertainty now. Up and down were nowhere and nobody was going to rescue her this time.

She was falling off the sailboat again and nobody was there, but at least now she knew how to swim a little better.