Life Beyond the Bar Scene: Total Devastation1

by Laurelin

I still think about him all the time. His name is still often on my lips although we don’t speak much these days. At first every time my cell phone lit up I would imagine his name being in the center of my screen and sometimes it was, and my heart would leap. He doesn’t reach out so much anymore, and I don’t expect it. It was silly, what we had. It wasn’t real; he wasn’t real and neither was I.

He hid things. I pretended not to know things about him and whenever I wanted to ask, I would open my mouth and something different would come out. He often left me speechless, breathless, weak in the knees, yet somehow, I was sure of myself with him until he was gone. With his absence suddenly those feelings turned to powerlessness; I was unsure of the world around me. The world was hazy, veiled.

I wore color contacts; he will never even know the real color of my eyes. Going out with a different guy the other night for drinks I had to laugh, because when I caught him staring at me I felt the words finally bubbling to the surface, a string of the many things I had never said. “Green,” I almost shouted, “my eyes are green.”

“Okay….” The new guy said, and it didn’t matter, but I felt better, almost.

Going home that night I knew that maybe it was best for me to be by myself for a little while. The cobwebs in my head needed shaking, I needed a reality check, not someone else to lean on.

Still, I think about him all the time. Some people come and go like a summer breeze, and others leave wreckage in their wake, loving and leaving like a storm whipped up off the ocean back home in Rhode Island. The sky turns black as night and flashes with lightning, splintering the sky like cracks in ice just before it breaks. The thunder is so loud you can feel it in your chest; you can breath it in. The storms are over as quickly as they began and when the clouds clear you are acutely aware that while it felt like time stopped, it in fact, did not.

Whoever I was with this guy doesn’t matter now. The clouds have scattered and time has left him only in my memory. The only thing that’s clear after this storm is that going forward from here, I can’t settle for anything less than total devastation.

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