It was a day like any other. I had gone to work, had a couple beers with my buddies, and drove home, expecting to see my sweet fiancée sitting on the couch, cuddling with our cute pekingese puppy Argus in her grey sweatpants, and raising her arms to me for a hug as I entered the apartment we shared. I had no reason not to expect this, as it had happened almost exactly that way everyday for three years.
On top of not expecting anything strange, the day started out and then stayed gorgeous! For the first time all winter, the warm sun blasted me right in the face through the blinds, tickling my eyes open, as well as coaxing a smile to my lips. Now, if you knew me, you would know that am not a morning person, and thus a smile NEVER finds itself on my lips in the morning. But that particular spring day, and that particular sunrise did it to me, and I got up immediately, although it was only 6am, and I usually didn’t get up until 7am. Sunlight brought color to my cheeks and a warmth to my heart I didn’t know could occur so early in the morning. It made me feel happy to be alive. I rolled over and kissed Jennifer on the cheek.
She stirred slightly, leaning into my kiss, but her eyes remained closed. A tiny smile touched her lips, and it only made mine grow. Studying her face briefly, a memory of when I first met her ran through my head. It was a fond memory we reminisced about often. She was a friend of a friend, and by some fluke I was introduced to her at a new year’s party. When I shook her hand and looked into her striking brown eyes, I knew something was special about her. As the night went on, I found myself drawn to her. She tells me that she felt the same, like there were hands pushing against her back, shoving her in my direction.
We ended up talking the whole night, deep conversations about things I hadn’t even told my best friend. It was weird, because I usually keep my life to myself, especially to a complete stranger, but her eyes begged me to open up to her, and like an obedient slave I couldn’t say no. At the end of the night, I walked her out to her car, parked in front of my friend’s house on the curb, right in front of mine.
“Matt,” she said to me, her voice lifting off into space on the freezing January air. “It was a pleasure to meet you. I can’t believe Steve had never mentioned you before!”
“Me, either,” I said with a smile. Jokingly, I blurted out, “He’s a jerk.”
We both laughed. An awkward silence followed, during which I most desperately wanted to kiss Jennifer’s beautiful, and slightly chattering, lips. I decided not to, sparing us both from potentially freezing our lips together, and it turns out, that’s what sealed the deal for me. Later, she said that she thought I was ‘gentlemanly’ for not trying to kiss her after that first meeting, that I had respect for her. The gesture I thought was an epic failure on my part (as I drove home I yelled at myself and pounded my fists on the steering wheel for being so stupid) turned out to be my saving grace.
I thought she was my saving grace.
Deciding to follow the guy code and not call her for three days (as to keep her on her toes and to make myself not seem desperate), I called her on the night of day three to see if she wanted to go out on a date with me. I felt very formal, as if I was asking her dad for her hand in marriage. It wasn’t really that serious, but to me it felt that way. I was a nervous wreck, but obviously I kept my cool. I scored a date with her.
And the rest is history. That was five years ago. We had gone through a couple small rough patches, like every couple does, but overall, we had a solid, happy relationship. We went out with friends almost every weekend, we attended out of state weddings for various family members, we played video games together, we even shared a checking account. Two years into our relationship we decided to live together. Living together takes guts, and that’s exactly what we both had.
I remember the day I asked her to marry me. Jennifer is the biggest baseball fan I know. I mean, bigger and more die-hard than most of my male buddies. A whole section of her closet was devoted to her jerseys and baseball caps. After a year of living together (to give you an idea of time frame), I asked her to attend a night game with me. At first she didn’t want to, but I told her I won the tickets at work, and we just had to go. How could we waste two perfectly good baseball tickets?
Biting onto the lure, she agreed.
Of course, I had bought the tickets months ago, I was only putting on a ploy to throw her off my scent. We got all decked out in our game gear, rode the light rail down to the baseball stadium, got our hotdogs and beers, and took our seats. What a grand view of the megatron we had. After the 7th inning stretch, a camera was pointed at us, I got down on one knee, and proposed to her in front of the entire stadium.
Jennifer was happier than I had seen her in the entire time I had known her. It goes without saying that she said yes, and I slipped that beautiful diamond ring onto the finger of my soulmate.
Well, I thought that, innocently enough, until the evening of that perfect spring day in April.
Jingling my keys around at the front door, I entered as per usual, yelling out playfully, “Hey Lucyyyyy, I’m hoooooome!”
No response came to me then, no sound from the TV. Argus came running up to me, his tiny legs whipping to and fro, carrying him across the tiled kitchen floor with the clicking of his toe nails. Panting, crying softly, he whined, the look in his eyes was reaching to me, worried. I cocked my head to one side, curious.
“Jennifer?”
Dropping my bag to the floor, I knelt down to rub Argus’s little head, and looked into his eyes. “What’s the matter, Argie? Is something wrong?”
I wish he could have answered me, as it would have saved me from some inevitable shock. He only whined some more and ran down the hallway and back to me. Back and forth, frantically, like the world was coming to an end. Rubbing my face apprehensively, my mind began to twirl and blur. Confusion took me over, and I did not know what to think. Should I be going to the closet to get my gun to arm myself against an intruder? Should I be calling the police? Did something happen to Jennifer?
Jennifer.
I was about to run further into the house, when something on the counter caught my eye. Never in life will I forget the moment I noticed the item on the counter, strangely propped up against the banana hanger, holding two browning bananas by a thread.
A daintily folded note.
Picking up the note, my heart pounded in my chest so hard I actually clutched my chest with my other hand. A thought shot through my brain: What are you worrying about? I bet it’s just a nice little ‘I love you’ note, or a grocery list, or a cute poem she wrote for you. What are you afraid of?
This.
Taking in a deep breath, and letting it out in shakes and spasms, I unfolded the note with my forefinger and thumb, snapping it open like a hinge. Before I could read it, another thing caught my eye, the most devastating, life altering, heart wrenching thing I would have never expected.
Jennifer’s engagement ring.
I’m not too sure what happened once I saw her ring lying there not on her finger, but when my memory starts again, I found myself slumped on the floor, my face hot and wet, my teeth grinding and my breath short and quick. The note was still in my hand, but the ring sat on the kitchen floor in front of me. Once a symbol of love, loyalty, and dedication, it now loomed large in my vision, like a hounded, obnoxious reminder of some sort of cruelty or barbarous betrayal. It seemed to rise upwards with strength and rage, and grow in size as to shove me in the corner like the petty bastard I am.
Muscles tightening up, it took all the strength I had to lift the note up to my face again and read it. Though my words were nothing more than a mumbling, snotty mess, I read it aloud.
“My dearest Matt,” it read, in Jennifer’s round and perfect script. “I don’t know where to start, so I’ll start here. I love you.”
I stopped reading there and banged my head on the kitchen counter, up against which my back rested, wincing in pain. Argus ran back and forth still, even more distraught by my apparent internal malfunction.
“I’ve always loved you, from the day, no, the very instant we met. You know that. As much as I love you, and as much as it pains me to say this, I have to let you go.” Pausing to rub my burning eyes with the heels of my hands, the note dropped to my lap. The last sentence struck me as funny, and through my tears, I began to chuckle. Soon the chuckle escalated into a full out laugh, and after that, it kept escalating until I sounded like I had lost my mind. Probably because I had, although not permanently.
Lifting it back up near my eyes, I continued reading through my crazed smile. “It’s time to be honest. You know I’ve always tried to be as open and honest with you as I could. You also know that I have a problem effectively communicating things that are hard for me to say. This is why I wrote it down, because I just can’t face it. I’m in love with another man, Matthew.”
Tears burst forth from my eyes unexpectedly. My eyes suddenly full of tears and blurry, I closed them, since I couldn’t read the words through a waterfall. She knew I’d have a reaction like this, and that’s why she left a note, instead of telling me face to face. And she said she fell in love with me because I respected her. Little did I know she neither respected me, or herself.
My insides felt like they had been pulled out through my belly button and ground up in a blender. Liquified, jelly-fied, like something that should slither down the drain and mix into the abyss, forgotten yet a part of a larger system. In the same way that we are all made of stardust, I felt my heart exploding, the particles spreading about the universe to be made into other lifeforms a billion years from now.
I started to question not only her, since she was pretty much telling me our whole relationship was a lie, but also myself, and my motives. Why had I loved her in the first place? Wasn’t it obvious she was a scumbag from the beginning?
Calming down slightly, I knew I had been thoroughly duped. Because, no, there hadn’t even been an inkling of her infidelity, of her scheming, of her low backstabbing ways. She had been perfect. The front she put up was of the perfect girl, lovely, charming, witty, accepting, willing to make sacrifices, but it had all been for naught. It had all been so she could desert me and be with another man.
“And I went to be with him. I’ve left you the engagement ring. You can sell it so you can afford my part of the rent now that I’m gone. Please don’t try to contact me. I will love you forever, but I have to do this, for me. Give Argus a kiss for me. All my love, Jenny.”
All my love, Jenny. All my love, Jenny All my love Jenny AllmyloveJennyAllmyloveJenny...
Copyright © 2013 by Erin M. Truesdale
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