By 6:30 AM, I've been awake in the late twilight hours for a little bit. I tossed and turned for a few hours, after spending the day getting sick and being hungover.
Was not expecting that from the relatively small number of drinks I had had the night before. It doesn't help when you look back and can't pinpoint that 'small number', but you know it's in the single digits.
Or at least you think it was.
The 6:33 train leaves Glenbrook station at that time. Mom said it was the one she wanted to be on. We're in the car and I gun it at 6:34, hanging an immediate left out of the apartment complex's parking lot, aimed towards Stamford. The apartment complex's name is Spruce Meadows. There are evergreens dotted around the outskirts of a patch of grass. Smooth.
"I really wanted to be getting on the train at Glenbrook," she says.
No shit.
I sped up, racing back roads in hopes to catch the same train further down the line. I zigzag past the high school and down dark roads where ghostly figures in boots and jackets grumble to themselves, scraping the ice from their car windows.
In my head, I'm humming the intro jam to the Blues Brothers. Like this...
She's talking about how we 'wasted our Sundays' being all curled up in fetal positions underneath piles of blankets. She swears she still has a headache. And that she only had three glasses of wine.
I tell her how it wasn't until Sunday morning that I found myself hunched over the toilet bowl, yelling the name of a large-horned, furry bovine. Yaaaaaaaak!
I peel through downtown, get lucky and catch the majority of the green lights.
By 6:42, I pull up to the corner across from the train station. She tells me she's worried about getting in a 'cash expense report' from November. I find myself wishing that I had enough cash that my spending need be catalogued in an 'expense report'. Alas.
"Good bye," she says.
"Love you," I say.
As Mom jogs across the street, I turn the talk radio on and light a cigarette. The air is cold enough to bite the skin off my face. I only roll the window down enough to flick ash through it.
The radio plays a song by Adelle about a lost lover who settles down with another woman. Seemingly content. She sings about how her feelings have never died, how 'for her, it's not over', etc.
I can relate.
Nearly three years ago, I received a phone call. The conclusion of this call left me with a broken heart and an even shittier outlook on where my life was going. I proceeded to drink myself retarded for the next couple of months.
The trouble with Facebook is, even after you've taken the necessary measures in the real world, ending a relationship doesn't mean that you no longer see what the other's up to. I remember a status she posted about how 'She hates all men, and she was glad they were teaching groin kicks in krav maga class that day.'
Excuse me? You left me. Never forget that little fact. I was in love, still in love, and I'm the one who gets left behind. Then I need to see posts about how I'm evil? No, thank you, ma'am.
Several months after the break up, I was walking along a road in Virginia with two friends on the way to a bar. I was still twenty at the time. She called, asking if 'I had time to talk'. My friends saw the look on my face. The sound of her voice, like it was breaking my heart all over again.
I said I was busy. She asked me to call her back.
I did two months later. "Are you kidding me?!" she asks. Then she hangs up.
I guess I am an evil man. The devil. A horrible person only deserving of horrible things.
But in the end, I find solace in the fact that I never strayed from the path my heart has set out for me.
Of course everything will always be my fault in your eyes, and maybe in mine as well. But I want the world to know that you were not without faults of your own.
I want them to know that for nine long-distanced months, I loved a hellkite. An intellectual firecat.
And I always will.
Steps and bounds beyond the silly regrets of high school relationships, where I was used to alleviate virginities when asked to and then discarded when I became attached, there will always be this relationship.
Little over three years ago, I was engaged. I asked the woman I loved to marry me, and she said yes. My feet would never have hit the ground again, had it not been for that fucking phone call.
As I'm seeing it all now, in these still moments before sunrise, it's probably all for the best.
I'm nobody's white knight, but my conscience is clear. Save for the indiscretions of a certain evening involving far too much alcohol and way too many hugs for strangers, but that's another story altogether.
That's it. Now my love is for the redhead on my left, and she actually appreciates it. She appreciates me.
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