My
girl and I had had only one huge fight before, but this was something else. This
was Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki
combined. It was the beginning and the end of our second great war. I feared that this might be something that we
could not come back from, the fallout being too much this time. It's true, she
might have started this conflict, but I sure as hell finished it. I resorted to
using my mouth, a registered weapon of mass destruction, to win and end the
argument. I didn't realize it then, but it ended the relationship as well. As I
sat amid the scorched earth, the thought of losing her started to cling to me
like a heavy grey sweater darkened black by the driving icy rain. It was only hours since the battle, but with zero
communication from either side it felt longer. Time took what felt like eons to
pass, and while it did the ever flowing tears steadily grooved paths into the
landscape of my cheeks. These mighty rivers left seemingly permanent reminders
of the words I said to her. For some reason, I kept asking myself three questions over and over. Why was
I so fucking stupid? Why was I so mean? Why was I so me?
There
was collateral damage everywhere, and it lay unmoved. The smashed remains of the
glass she threw here, the uncountable office supplies from her desk, there. The
glass, I ducked, the desk, I flipped. The apartment was a war zone and I was
trying to survey the damage. In all the wreckage, there was only one object
damaged that wasn't left completely fucked up beyond all recognition. The lone
survivor happened to be the wall that butted up against the front door. It only
received a small crack, a flesh wound really, and since the damage was only
superficial I left it alone, leaving its plaster blood to gather into harmless
little piles by the front door. The dust, left free to fall, mimicked the
grains of time that are trapped forever inside their prison of glass. These
particle imposters kept track of every minute that had passed since she slammed
that very front door closed on me, on us. Why was I so stupid? Why was I so
fucking mean? Why was I so me?
I
flipped Help! over to the B side on
the way over to the dust pan and broom, in a move intended to end the deafening
silence, while still fulfilling my solemn duty to remove the carnage from the
battlefield. I was hoping the music would continue to help pass the time as I
cleaned up the rest of the mess. I was also hoping it would start to act as a
distraction from her and the fight. At first, I only got one out of two. Time
cleaning seemed to move fairly fast, but I still found myself reliving each and
every word launched towards one another,
the night before. I was also having flashbacks of all the events that left me
taking these endless trips back and forth to the garbage can. Sweep, walk,
dump, repeat, sweep, walk, dump, repeat. As the routine sunk in and the piles
started to fade, the memories started to fade too, the music was making good on
my second need. Each song distracted me a little more, until I was lulled into
a false sense of security. The music knew that I was now completely vulnerable and
it decided to ambush me on my final march to the kitchen. As the needle of the
record player dipped into the sixth set of grooves, I immediately started taking
fire from the wall-mounted machine gun speakers. The first few sound bullets
perforated my shirt and grazed the skin beneath; soon enough I was taking heavy
damage directly through my chest and into my heart. As I was being shredded
apart my eyes focused on what was happening directly in front of me. I swear, for
those two minutes and three seconds, I watched in stunned, slow motion silence
as the remaining shards of broken glass and bent silver paper clips spun and
twirled with each other on a vertical dance floor made of the dull, bone white
plaster. These casualties of war shimmered and shined together one last time on
the long final decent towards their final resting place. Sometimes the music
can help, and sometimes it can kill. Yes Paul, at that moment I believed in
yesterday too, and as I laid there dying, three familiar questions took me into
the blackness. Why was I so stupid? Why was I so mean? Why was I so fucking me?
