Life Happens - Dennis Gordon (books like beach read TXT) 📗

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