his heart? The answer was in her hands. The things you can’t say, you write. That was why Stuart came home that evening to find a note waiting for him on the kitchen table.
There are only two kinds of letters that lovers send to one another, the love letter, and the Dear John. It is easy enough for even the most ineloquent writer to knock off a love letter. But the Dear John is another beast entirely.
A person should never have their heart broken that way. It’s cruel and cowardly. But if you are going to end things in this unchivalrous fashion, the letter should always be handwritten. Emily’s was.
It should not, however, be written on a lined yellow paper pad with a ballpoint pen, lest it be perceived from a distance as a shopping list. Which is, sadly, what happened to Stuart, leaving him quite unprepared for the shock of what he was about to read:
Stuart,
I want to tell you something. And I want to say it in a way that will make you understand how very much I have loved you. And why that has changed.
It’s not going to be easy. I don’t have a noble reason. I think you should know that.
You want to hear one, I guess. You want to hear that I don’t think I’m worthy of you, or that I’m trying to protect you, or that I’d been walking along the street one day and found my one and only soulmate and had to be with him.
But I can’t tell you any of those things.
You’ll want me to convince you that I don’t know it’s going to break your heart that I’ve left, or that I’m only going for a little while to see if I may come back.
But I can’t tell you any of those things either.
Maybe you’d even settle for me telling you that I’ve never really loved you, and it just took me three years to get around to telling you.
But I’m not sure that’s true. I did love you at some point, and I may still, just not in the right way.
I guess this is the point where I say I’m leaving you, though I guess you’ll be the one that’s going, and I’m sorry for that too. That looks awful, what I just wrote. Awful and true. I guess what I’m really saying is it’s over. I’m sorry to be a coward and say it on paper, but I couldn’t stand to see your face when you found out.
Love, (Again I’m sorry, it’s awful and true)
Emily
She had thought it kinder to end that way, to seal the poisoned epistle with love. That was bullshit, he thought.
Stuart was reeling, literally. He was holding on to a chair so that he wouldn’t fall over. He had just been gone a few hours. This couldn’t have come to her today. She’d had this lined up, ready, maybe for days.
He sat trying to process what he’d read, tipping the large double double he’d brought in for himself into his mouth in long burning gulps. Then he drank the one he’d brought for her, as the questions flooded his brain. She wanted to leave him? He had to go? She didn’t love him? She did?
He was devastated and confused. He had loved Emily for what seemed like forever. How could she leave him with all of these questions?
In fact, she hadn’t. He heard her before he saw her. She was hovering by the kitchen door. She’d been waiting for him to come home and read it, and she’d been there the whole time.
He felt sick, and after a mad dash for the bathroom, he was. Re-scalding his esophagus with the coffee he’d just drunk. It burned. Everything burned. Then, not knowing what else to do, he cried his goddamned eyes out.
He was in there for almost an hour, during which time Emily made a guilty walk across the kitchen to the bathroom door, running her nails softly up and down the wood grain, then asking if he couldn’t let her in. Asking if he was okay.
He was so not okay.
He might be in there still, the sorrow seemed so great, if she hadn’t then asked him not to do anything stupid, since her Ritalin pills were in the bathroom cupboard.
Kill himself? In the bathroom of their, her, fucking condo? With a bottle of Ritalin? He was so insulted that his indignation propelled him to his feet, out of the bathroom and through the front door.
It wasn’t indignation that made him call her a “stupid cunt” before slamming the door behind him, and it wasn’t the shock or the pain. He said it because as much as he loved her, and as much as he was going to miss her, Emily could be a really big cunt sometimes, and a stupid one too, the whole Ritalin-as-a-suicide device thing being a prime example, the letter being another. Who does that? Then waits around to see your reaction? You know who does that? A stupid cunt, that’s who. And now, as she had so clearly made it known, he had nothing to lose by telling her so. So he had.
On that day in September, the first day of the year that she left, everything had changed, and nothing had changed.
The fact that he loved her hadn’t changed. The fact that she didn’t love him hadn’t changed. Not that day anyway. He hadn’t lost his soul, or his manhood, or his need to keep breathing.
Not the fact that the girl he’d loved for so many years, and he did love her, was a bit controlling and a bit manipulative and had never thought that he could really make it as an artist. Or that she had always made fun of his mother and always been jealous of Elizabeth and never really tried to get close to her, even though Elizabeth was one of the few people in this world Stuart thought of as a friend.
Those were just the things that popped into his head unbidden on the ride down the elevator.
He loved her so much, his body was aching at the loss of her. But it did not make her perfect.
Still in shock, Stuart walked himself over to his local bar, a pub called appropriately enough, The Local, almost without thinking. He ordered a pint, hoping it would soothe his singed throat, and attempted to wrap his head around the fact that he was now heartbroken and homeless. Then he ordered another, because the first one had tasted good. Then another. Then he decided if he ordered a pitcher, he could cut his wait time between drinks. He sat there sipping and lost in thought, mulling things over until a heavy arm landed on his shoulder, and a slurred voice asked if “I can get a little of that.”
Stuart’s particular brand of misery did not demand company, especially from a greasy fat guy who’d probably been there all day, so he shrugged off the offending limb, trying to pretend he hadn’t heard the man. This produced a low rumbling growl from the fatty, who turned to the bartender, saying he was none too impressed with the “fuckin’ piece of shit too fuckin’ cheap to share his fuckin’ beer.”
Stuart sighed and pushed what was left in the pitcher down the bar before sliding off his stool and walking out the door. He didn’t want to give it up. Didn’t want to leave, having nowhere else to go. But he also didn’t want to get himself in a fight, or as he liked to call them, beatings.
Stuart was a big guy, tall and not overly thin, but he was not a tough guy. Blame it on being raised by an overly doting mother, but he just did not have a killer instinct. He could not fight at the best of times and certainly did not have it in him that night. Standing up, he could barely keep his knees from giving out. This was not due to the fear of an impending ass kicking, nor due to the fact that he’d had more to drink than was usual even for him. No. On top of being dumped, on top of forcing him to seek solace in a bar where ugly men said ugly things, Emily had given him a cold. He’d felt it slowly settling over him while he’d been at work that day. It that had lit upon her lightly the weekend before but was destined to take him down to hell and back. Typical.
Out on the street, he felt lost. He hadn’t been ready to face the world yet, and he had no idea how to go about it. Knowing he was not far from an area frequented by hookers, he had a wild notion that he should go find one. He could forget things for