This Is Not A Heart

The next morning, I woke up to a messy room, puffy eyes, and a knot in the back of my throat.  I had sifted through the pieces of the relationship all nite trying to deduce where the screw-up came from, and I was fed up. I rolled out of bed, took some vitamins, showered, put on a pretty new dress, a pair of heels, and a fitted blazer. Then I cleaned the litter-boxes, and triple Ziploc bagged the contents. Next, I placed his underwear that he had left in my hamper in a another Ziploc bag and washed my hands, and placed both bags in my purse. I had a mission. When I arrived at his door, it was wide open, and he wasn’t home, but his roommate was. I explained to him what had happened; his roommate hadn’t heard a thing about it. He said he was sorry, he had no idea, and that I deserved an explanation.  It hadn’t been more than fifteen minutes when he walked into their small studio in the Tenderloin. Wide eyed, he raised his eyebrows and said, “What’s up?” I said, “I’m here for my things; the belt you borrowed and the sweater I gave you, and here’s your dirty underwear. And I deserve an explanation.” He asked if I wanted to get some coffee. We walked to a coffee shop next to Powell.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“How did this happen?”

“I don’t want to be with you anymore. I realized I was unhappy.”

“You said you loved me,” I believed it.

“I don’t know why I said that. I never loved you.” He lied, the son of a bitch looked straight into my eyes and said he loved me. “What can I say, I’m a very codependent person. What I liked the most about you was that you cared about me.”

I quenched my tears and wished I had never met him. “You’re a bad person. You used me physically, emotionally. You consumed my time and my heart. I trusted you because you asked me to.”

He grew frustrated. “What do you want me to say? How can I make it up to you? Can I buy you a new pair of shoes?”

My stomach turned. “I would have been satisfied with sleeping with you once and never seeing you again.”

“Well, what does that say about you?” The nerve. “Are you done making me feel guilty? I’m going to go home.”

I wasn’t. But there was no logic or compassion to him. He got up and left, and only looked back once from the corner of his eye. I wouldn’t have heard an explanation that would have made me forgive him. After all, he was a selfish, greedy artist who only painted paintings of himself and spent his idle time setting the timer on his camera and photographing himself. He mentioned he had an over-genius IQ on several occasions, and he was obsessed with his own intelligence. But somewhere deep inside, the edge of which only glistened when he was blackout drunk was pure self-loathing arrogance. It was clear at this moment that I realized what he had realized. That my love for him could not makeup for the hatred he had for himself. Not that there are any excuses for such pathetic inhumanity, but that it did exist.

I watched him walk up the street and turn the corner. I sat in that coffee shop for half an hour, contemplating, collecting all these broken pieces. I felt cold. So I went to Benetton and bought a beautiful knit mohair coat. And then I met up with West, a bubbly, fabulous, adorable ray of gay sunshine. And we came to the unanimous decision that I would need a new black dress. So we went to a trendy little boutique near Chinatown called Shotwell. I bought the sluttiest black dress they had in the smallest size. And then we hopped in a cab and went back to the Tenderloin, because I wasn’t satisfied.

For nearly twenty minutes, West and I waited downstairs until someone let us into his building. On the fifth floor, West held the elevator, my purse, and my shopping bags, while I ran to his front door with the bag of cat shit and a note. I dumped the entire contents on his front door, and left a note on top that said, “My sincerest apologies to Jeremy” (his roommate).

I ran back to the elevator and West and I made a dash for it.