Heartbreak for Dinner: It's Kind of a Long Story (17 page)

The smell of pasta sauce and ground beef wafted through
the apartment to my room,
where I stood sweeping hair balls and vacuuming
dust piles. Two beeps notified me the oven was ready and I returned to the kitchen,
turning on the timer for 60 minutes and readjusting my checkered apron in the process.
Vincent was on his way over for Italian Thursdays, and although it was a tradition
I usually rejoiced in, my mood was far from jovial. After placing a large glass
dish with lasagna on the metal rack, I grabbed a wet towel from the kitchen and
took to wiping all the dusty surfaces in my place.

A good half hour had passed by the time I was wiping the final piece
of furniture, a wooden drawer in the corner of my room. I heard the lock turn and
Bruno rush to the door, his distant barking a warning that filled me with immediate
dread. Vincent hollered my name and walked toward the kitchen, where he set down
some sort of plastic bag I assumed carried wine and his favorite dessert. My back
was turned to him when he entered the room, and I remained in that position as I
cleaned a spot on the wall in silence.

Deciding I couldn’t walk down the aisle with a person I didn’t love
was a labor of sweat and secretive tears that took me six whole months to digest.
I won 10 Academy Awards during that period of anguish, where I sobbed almost daily
in the shower or behind closed doors at the office then went back to life with a
pasted-on smile. After tormenting myself daily with possible break-up scenarios
and my inability to choose one, it dawned on me there isn’t really a “correct” method
of calling things off with someone you care for and respect. In a terrible attempt
to just get it over with, I resolved to end things that night once Vincent arrived
home from work. In my mind, I’d ask him if he was happy and escalate things from
there, culminating in the confession of my own misery and begging that he not hate
me.

“Hey babe,” he greeted me, walking over to the bathroom and washing
his hands on the sink.

I said nothing and continued my menial task, as if cleaning were my
favorite thing in the world and the walls being dust-free my number one priority.
After he dried his hands, he went over to where I stood and hugged me from behind.
My heart sped aboard a bullet train as soon as his hands touched me and I held back
the desire to vomit.

“Hey,” he moved my hair over my shoulder and lightly kissed the exposed
part of my neck, “is everything alright?”

“Yep,” I replied shortly, nerves consuming every fiber of my being.
“Everything’s fine.”

“No, it’s not,” he continued to kiss me and stroke my hair gently.
“I know when you’re not okay. Trouble at work?”

“Of course I’m okay,” I lied without turning, wiping the same corner
over and over in circular motions while the towel dripped water down the side of
the drawer from the pressure.

“Annah,” my fiancé grabbed the damp cloth and set it down, placing
his hands on my shoulders and giving me no choice but to face him. “What in the
world is wrong with you?”

An avalanche of emotions that had inched along for years reached its
breaking point at that moment to come down with unstoppable force. I threw my arms
around him and began sobbing loudly, my tears staining his blue shirt and eventually
wetting his entire shoulder. I allowed myself to jump into an infinite abyss of
sorrow, breathing all but possible as I embraced Vincent for what I knew would be
the last time.

“There,” he whispered and rubbed my upper back, waiting for the ripples
of my sobbing to quiet down. “Easy, babe.”

I looked up at him with a pained expression on my red face and mascara-streaked
tears poured down in every direction. “I cannot do this,” I finally choked out and
realized I made no sense. Vincent looked confused but still held me tight, his protective
embrace magnifying the pain and guilt I’d been carrying for almost three years.
So many times I’d willed myself to love him, to delete the memory of times that
would never return and move on with life, yet I couldn’t. Finally opening my mouth
and articulating my feelings took longer than molasses rolling down a hill in cold
weather.

“Vin . . .” I let my voice trail off and a sob choked
me. “We have to call off the wedding. I just, I can’t.”

“What do you mean?” he winced, incredulous. “Where is this coming
from?”

“It’s not coming from anywhere. I just think that if we were meant
to get married we would’ve done so a long time ago. Don’t you?”

“Yeah, but we’ve had a few bumps along the way, babe,” he protested
softly. “You haven’t liked any of the churches, and then you changed jobs, and,
well, shit happens. It just hasn’t been the right timing for things.”

I didn’t know how to tell him that the right timing comes along when
you make the effort no matter how great, and if I’d wanted to, a white dress on
clearance would’ve been purchased and we would’ve been married in court two days
after he proposed. The truth remained that I didn’t need a circus wedding at all,
only that the details it took to plan one had delayed the process of shooting a
gun whose trigger I knew I’d never pull in the first place.

“I love you, Vincent,” I said to him and meant it. “Believe me, I’ve
been thinking about this for months and it isn’t just an idea that suddenly popped
into my head. This has been a long time coming.”

He grabbed my hands tightly and tried to knock some sense into me,
exclaiming I was just confused and needed more time to process big changes. When
he pulled away to look at me, his face was too marked with tears and a reflection
of the pain I’d secretly been harboring on my own.

“I’m sorry, V,” I whispered and remained bawling against him for so
long I eventually ran out of tears. I slid off the engagement ring and placed it
on his pinky. He looked down at it and grimaced, asking me to consider keeping it.
I pointed out that one day someone would come along who really did deserve it, and
that keeping it would just be a constant reminder of yet another thing I had failed
at.

“You deserve everything,” he breathed.

I kissed his lips one final time and declined with a heavy heart,
concluding that people often cheat or desert lovers because doing the right thing
is an agonizing venture we’re all not cut out for. In an effort to build a final
divide between us, I removed myself from him and sat on my bed. “Please go,” I said,
resting my head on the headboard and closing my eyes, the hopes of being alone and
drowning in a pathetic pool of misery the most enticing thing in days. “Seeing you
walk away is going to kill me and that’s not the last memory I want of you.”

Vincent stayed in the room for a few more minutes and eventually sat
on the bed. I thought for a moment he’d plead for me to rethink things, but instead
his brown eyes looked through the windows of my soul and he kissed me. I shut my
eyelids and conjured up the memory of the night we met, just a boy and a girl with
a common interest in rock brought together by a design beyond their comprehension.

I wanted to tell him that in spite of everything, I’d do it all over
again if given the chance. I wanted to say just how much crossing paths with him
had meant, and how blessed I felt to know someone of his kind. I wanted to tell
him how good he was and all the magnificent things he was capable of, but instead,
I refrained from speaking at all. Emotion overcame me when his lips left my own
and, in an instant, he was gone, locking the door shut behind him and never looking
back. I allowed the pain to split me wide open and all my mistakes to pour out one
by one. I prayed that a clean break would eventually come and hugged my knees in
a sitting position as the night set in and turned everything to black. When the
daylight arrived, it found me in the same position, my dog resting his head at my
feet and crying in his sleep for what I assumed was the incertitude of the unwritten.

As much as it pains to admit
it,
I was abstinent from a lot more
than sex during the seven months I purposefully did away with possibly the most
enjoyable part of being a homo sapien. I guess that when it came to my celibacy,
I reasoned that if I didn’t take care of the lady parts the way a woman should,
the chances of being tempted to break if I were to encounter a Ryan Gosling look-alike
would be slim. It all started innocently enough, I assure you, with one waxing appointment
missed a month into my vow and then a second and then, before I knew it, I was giving
Playboy models from the 70s a run for their money with my lovely bush.

I blinked my eyes and six months had passed me by. A day before
“the end,” I remembered being long overdue for a wax but was mortified beyond words
for my usual lady to see me in such a state, so I shaved it all off. Immediately
after, I was painfully reminded why a girl should never resort to shaving that area.
A maddening itch seemed to follow me everywhere I went, and although my mom swore
by baby powder and cotton panties, I couldn’t get rid of it for the life of me.

“You’re just going to have to live through it, hija,” she told me
over the phone while I complained for the 50th time. “Just give it two weeks and
you should be fine. Why didn’t you go to your usual wax lady in the first place?”

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that, so I just said, “I was
lazy.”

I knew all too well that explaining my abstinence and the reasons
for it would open up a therapy session with my mother I wasn’t in the mood for that
afternoon.

Two days later, I was at my local Wal-Mart trying to buy some
essentials when, suddenly, the itch struck. Now, if you’ve ever had this particular
problem, then you know how hard it is to keep from scratching. It’s as if the more
you try to cast it out of your mind, the harder the need to reach down there becomes,
until you’re rabidly clawing at your skin in front of a thousand gawking strangers.

As I searched for an open cashier, the itch was in full force and
begging me to slip a helping hand inside my pants and go to town. I wanted nothing
more than to
go to the bathroom and leave my cart outside, but that meant risking some asshole
taking it, and carrying a 50 lb. bag of dog food was a task I felt no desire to
repeat that morning
.
As a result, I did what any respectable young lady would
do: got my ass in line and waited, praying the heavens would part and, for once,
it would move along quickly.

The customer before me was one of these loud Cubans, who obviously
was in the process of learning English and wanted to practice with whomever was
game. She started talking to the cashier about how the weather was so “hat,” but
thankfully the attendant seemed to be in no mood for chit chat.

When it was time to pay, this lady pulled out the largest wad
of cash I’d ever seen, counting slowly and enunciating all the numbers like a preschooler
practicing their 1, 2, 3s.

I can only assume her daughter was a stripper and pay day had
come because there’s no other reason a regular person should have so many singles
readily available.

What seemed like a light year later, Blondie finished, and I
zipped through that line like I was running a triathlon in which the top prize was
a naked Channing Tatum covered in vodka sauce. I jogged to my Camry with cart in
tow and threw my groceries in the trunk, shoving the cart by the grass and quickly
shutting my door. I sat in the driver’s seat and, in a rage, undid my pants, making
sure there was no one around to take pictures, seeing as one day I hoped to reach
famosity and all that jazz.

When I confirmed the coast was
indeed clear, I began clawing away furiously at the top of my nether regions, ecstatic
to be able to somehow alleviate the agony I’d been feeling up until that very minute.

I don’t know how much time passed
as I moaned in ecstasy and finally felt soothed, but when I looked up, there was
a young boy staring at me as he pulled a cart away – the same one I’d been too lazy
to properly store in the cart lane just a few minutes before.