Foolish

Falling out of love is quite enough to make a person sick, to ruin their liver, to shrink their waistband and interrupt any chance of a sleep pattern. It is a horrible, wretched feeling that begins in your stomach before it can creep all the way up to your heart. The absence of happy butterflies flitting about above your abdomen causes a sort of concaving to occur around your middle. Most mistake this feeling for common anxiety, but it is far more powerful than that. It squeezes the life out of your internal organs, until you feel oddly lopsided and deflated, as well as shockingly empty. Your heart will not break until much later, when you are eating un-purchased chocolates in aisle thirteen of Vons, casually gorging yourself while telling your best friend that you are absolutely fine. It is in that moment that you realize that you want your mother and your drug dealer in the same room for the first time in your life, as both perform their nurturing duties for you simultaneously.

There are far too many things in life that you become incapable of handling the moment you are told that you are no longer loved or wanted by someone you care about very much. Bathing regularly quickly becomes one of them, and touching up your roots completely falls to the wayside. Shoes that match your panty hose are another problem, as is remembering to do your Calculus homework for summer school. You seem to forget quite frequently that you are no longer supposed to send your ex charming text messages in the morning, quirky jokes and pictures mid-afternoon, and drunken fragments of sentences when the bars get out at two am. All of the weight you swore up and down that you would lose for him suddenly slips off of your frame effortlessly, if you consider spending hours bent retching and coughing in front of the liquor store “effortless.”

Hearing his voice on the other end of the phone becomes a maddening chore, where it was once a pleasant ritual. Never do you come out on top of a conversation with someone who has just broken your heart. These talks always start off well, crescendo, and dive, crashing into the earth and shattering all hopes of any future un-screened phone calls.

“Oh, uh, hi, hey what’s up, how have you been?”

“Whitney, its been five days.”

“I know. I was just calling because I um, you know, was in your neighborhood, I mean, the neighborhood, not necessarily yours, I’m not like, stalking you or anything, I just, um, well, you live a few freeway exits away from my brother and…”

“Your brother lives six exits away. How did you get this number?”

“Well, anyways, I just wanted to see if maybe we could, you know, grab a coffee, and talk, maybe, say, Wednesday?”

“Whitney, I’ve told you eleven times. We are not dating anymore. Please move on. You’re starting to embarrass yourself.”

“Ah...I can see that I’ve caught you at a bad time. I should probably let you go. Its just that I miss you and we were in love two weeks ago and I’m really not sure how this all happened, and...oh, god, please don’t hang up on me…”

Click.

“Dammit.”

You hang up the phone feeling like a complete loser, a failure of life, the universe, love, and everything else. It seems you cannot sink much lower into the abyss of shamefulness and depravity that seems to be cradling your fragile soul. Buying a cat and living the rest of your life as an imitation of Holly Golightly seems quite attainable, so you slip into that black dress that now hangs loosely off your emaciated ribcage, pour yourself another glass of whiskey, and tell yourself that you are a wild thing who cannot be tamed for love. In reality, you are simply another fool who fell, and now, you must face the consequences.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.