End

An exercise from Old Friend From Far Away by Natalie Goldberg.

Tell me about how a relationship ended. (Names changed.)

There were a lot of ways it ended. I stopped loving him, for one. Over a year prior, in fact, without realizing it, without realizing love like that really comes to an end without you choosing to stop it. The way I started getting angry when he left hair in the bathroom sink, when the dirty dishes weren’t in the dishwasher. How I felt when he told me again and again with his camo-green eyes, No, I haven’t been smoking, after I detected the scent behind his tight-lipped kiss.

How it really ended, though, really physically ended, went something like this: he opened the back door after work, sent me a shifty glance and a muffled reply. I continued my work on the computer as I heard him close the bedroom door and shuffle around. He hadn’t been as talkative after spending the night in a local jail, which I called at the suggestion of a friend who didn’t know where he was when I awoke to an empty bed, and no sign of his usual slump on the beige futon. It was only a week after that event, after I called his parents, shaky, telling them he’d been arrested for his second DUI and driving without a license, and his mother said to me one last time, “Why didn’t you…” …nothing, knowing at last I couldn’t stop him from what he wanted, couldn’t share the blame.

He came out of the bedroom and sat on the couch, where he’d set up a new computer on the coffee table, and I went to the bathroom. The shower curtain looked odd–weighted, as if something was pushing against it, pulling on it, and when I tugged it open I found the bathtub full of clothes–his–a large pile of sweaters and jeans and socks strewn across the porcelain, stretching to the drain and faucet. I knew it was his weird, symbolic way of trying to leave.

When I asked him about it he said, “Have you slept with him?”

“What?” The answer was no, and I wouldn’t have, but I was in love with someone else. And I didn’t know how he knew.

Finally, I said, “I don’t think this is working. It hasn’t been for a long time.” It was like a bad movie.

His eyes glassed over. I felt nothing.

“But I still love you,” he squeezed out, head in his hands. I saw none of that–no more midnight drives with Pink Floyd filling the car. No more daytime picnics on the grass in Hidden Springs (I’d never tell you where it is). No more floating down Boise’s Snake River in rubber tubes or scrounging for rare rock albums at the Record Exchange. No more truthful smiles, no more passionate sex. No more of what I could barely remember.

“You don’t love me, Dave,” I said gently, pulling on my jacket. “You just need me.”

And, pushing my way through the back door, the night, I left him there, the way someone leaves a pair of socks with holes in the toes in a bag next to banana peels and empty tomato soup cans, when nothing more can be done for them. The way someone says, Look, I’m sorry, when they’re not. The way someone, quiet at first, tears from a womb.

(Sorry, I know this is one-sided, unjustified and somewhat vague. This is probably the end of something I need a lot more space to write.)

Ahead

An exercise from Old Friend From Far Away by Natalie Goldberg.

When did you know you were going to suffer but went ahead anyway?

Two instances. Different times of my life, different people, no names/names changed. Both to be continued.

_______________

“Now, this is pushing it a little,” he said, as he ran his hand over the slope of my back, the dip of my waist, the curve of my hip. We lay facing one another on his squeaky bottom bunk in a dorm room with white, gymnasium walls. “Luckily, I have amazing self-control.” He closed his eyes.

When I ran my hand over his chest, he trembled. I looked at him with a kind of awe, more astounded by my own actions, my intentions, than his. I knew it was wrong, but that didn’t stop me.

“You know, I’d tell you you’re beautiful,” I said, “but my nonfiction teacher doesn’t like that word.” He opened his eyes and pulled me closer to him.

“Why?” he asked, resting his head on his hand.

“Because,” I said, “‘beautiful’ is so subjective and abstract. I mean it’s not really descriptive at al–”

Lips on mine before the words even had a chance.

***

It was just past midnight the first time we’d decided to meet outside of an instant message. I can still picture the white gold glow of the streetlamps on the paved campus walkway, illuminating my anxiety as I stood frozen, waiting for him. I was surrounded by maple and birch trees characteristic of the University of Idaho, their leaves already rusting and tumbling to the ground in graceful torrents. The cold air sharpened like a blade on the veins in my nose as I inhaled.

“Hey, kid,” I heard, and there they were: the same arrogant eyes that caught mine from across the room in Fiction three days a week. The thick, dark, chaotically uniform hair. The leather jacket.

Two weeks later I found myself in the One World Café, running my middle finger over the rough plastic edge of my beverage cup. I watched the whipped cream melt into the remaining raspberry mélange in a dissonant swirl.

Keith sat across from me with his laptop open on the glass tabletop. I stared at the coffee beans encased beneath its surface, struggling to place my attention on their shape and texture, the cool, hard feel of the glass beneath my palm, the ornate brass bars of the balcony, the large painted doors hanging from the café ceiling. My eyes shifted to his iced hazelnut latté. Silver-studded ear. Animated laugh. I had failed.

He turned his computer screen toward me, revealing a large photograph of a dark-eyed girl.

“That’s Dannie,” he said. The girl he always talked about. The girl who reminded me of me a few years younger. The girl he would cheat on one week later.

He raised his eyes to mine and set his teeth in a grin.

“Isn’t she pretty?”

_______________

I helped my boyfriend cheat on a drug test. He obtained a latex condom full of urine from a fellow student in the high school bathroom. Knotted it, hid it in his jeans pocket all day–hoped it wouldn’t break, maybe more than he ever would again. When his mother passed him a plastic cup and waited outside the bathroom after school, he broke open the condom, emptied it, handed her back the cup. He passed the test.

That maneuver was half my advice. These days, I don’t remember which half. The point is he called me from Idaho, distraught, told me he might not be able to visit me in Canada for Christmas. It had been four or five months.

“My parents found out I was smoking cigarettes.” This was news to me. “They want to test me for pot.” He choked back something.

I stared at the bedroom wall regretfully, swallowed. “Well it doesn’t matter, right? I mean, it will come back negative, won’t it?”

Silence. There was always silence then.

Two years later I sat near the back of a courtroom in a summer dress as he plead guilty to his first DUI–his father rising, bug-eyed and panicked, from the pew next to me. I gripped the bench, lowered my head, closed my eyes.

The judge was kind enough to advise him against that plea, persuading him to change it. The room was crowded with a half-dozen other offenders–most for similar reasons, one for a hit-and-run. They all plead innocent, shook their heads incredulously when he spoke the truth.

He let out a nervous laugh, and when the judge asked him again for his plea, he said, “not guilty.”

His father exhaled. I sat back, and relief swept through me. The courtroom settled. We embraced the lie.

I don’t, I didn’t regret that answer–I never had before. What I regret now is having been the only one in the room who needed to believe it.