break-up story #2

By Dan Solomon

I was nineteen and still living with my parents, and I started getting letters placed in the mailbox, sealed with dark red candlewax. They were from the girl.

I never wanted to open them, but I did, because it hadn’t been going on long enough for me to not open them. At nineteen, getting letters sealed with wax and your name written out in her best handwriting – Daniel in a cursive script, even though she never called you that when you were together – is still too novel to dismiss. (I say as if now I’m so bored with women offering such things I discard them like magazine renewal subscriptions.)

Inside the envelope would usually be something small I had left at her house, or some reference to an inside joke between us, as well as a handwritten letter explaining the agony of being without me. It did little to abate my growing teenage ego, as I discovered that many of the things that I had attributed to my failures with women when I was younger were actually appealing to a certain kind of girl.

I’ll admit it. I kind of loved it. I would have loved it more if I hadn’t been handed the letters each morning they arrived by my dad. (They were never mailed, always placed in the box overnight.) I would have loved it even more if each one hadn’t been accompanied by several pages – also handwritten – from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

“Speak to us of love,”… the first one started, before the titular Prophet rained down what she took as wisdom with his trite aphorisms. Subsequent ones were drawn from the other entries – “Reason and Passion”. “Joy and Sorrow”. “Pain”.

There were phone calls, too, lots of them. I was working for a local magazine, writing a weekly column. I was not very mature and had published one all about Christina Aguilera’s midriff (this was 1999), onto which I wished to ejaculate. She called me the day it ran.

“You used to love when I wore that shirt I wore,” she began, and I told her not to call me at work anymore.

And all of this makes her sound like she’s the crazy one, but there’s a part I’d become accustomed to leaving out when I would tell this story. (It’s been many years since I told this story.) The part that I would leave out is that I made her break up with me.

It was my fault, really, and her reaction was the reaction of a person who was tricked and didn’t know what to do about it. I wasn’t ready to break up with her. I didn’t know how, and I thought much too highly of myself to just end the relationship, because I decided that I’d be devastating her, or whatever bullshit I had come up with to excuse the fact that I was scared. So instead, I sat through painful conversation after painful conversation in one awful week, gently hinting that it wasn’t working, but responding to every question she asked to get to the heart of the matter passive-aggressively. Eventually, tired of the way things were playing out, she asked if it was worth trying anymore. I said something real cool like, “I dunno”, and she said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

And so I was off the hook, and she was left feeling like she had chosen something that she hadn’t wanted. No wonder she thought the Gibran and the phone calls at work suggesting that she’d be delighted to allow me to put semen on her stomach would be well-received. I’d tricked her into doing the dirty work.

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Published:
08.21.09 / 7pm
Category:
break up stories