— Fiction —

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

(When I Only Get to Read the Jackets of Your Books Before You Get All Crazy)

et me first put your mind at ease: There are two kinds of people in this world: The first kind will usually track you down with his wolves and a radar device and then eat you, like in White Fang. This variety of person should give you cause for concern, as I’ve never heard of anybody eluding a pack of wolves carrying radar devices—it just doesn’t happen. The second category, into which I fall, is decidedly less vicious. For instance, there is a huge difference between making a serape out of your panties and making a flesh suit out of your skin. The first act is one of innocent nostalgia; the second, too hauntingly reminiscent of Black Like Me to even make it worth my while.

What I’m trying to articulate here is that you’ve been making it exceedingly difficult for me to perform my standard post-breakup ritual. For example, I was looking through your bookshelf and so I know that you are familiar with Kierkegaard’s notion of the “aesthetic self.” The fact that you have changed my number to read “Danger: Do Not Answer” when it should of course read either “Tyler” or “The Love of My Life” changes nothing. I am still there, don’t you see—tempting you. Consider the tale of Tantalus, which surely you’ve encountered in reading Mrs. Hamilton’s learned tome, Greek Mythology. So, if you’d like to keep living under the illusion that you can escape temptation by manipulating my sobriquet into something that should be feared (studies in Odd Facts and Crazy Numbers have shown that fear in women releases enzymes that make them bananas, sexually, similar to studies showing that “anything,” in men, also releases enzymes that stimulate arousal), so be it. And if you can resist the siren-like lure of my calls (which should be coming in every hour on the hour now), you’re a better person than I am—like the chick in The Good Earth who works so damned hard. I suppose this whole “Danger: Do Not Answer” thing is more of a difficulty for you, so let us talk about Facebook.

Do you know how I know that you defriended me? Because my other TWENTY-FIVE friends would never do that to me and also I’m not getting your status updates, which I’m sure are fraught with anguish over our breakup—something I’d be happy to help you heal and deal with. I’ll bet our make-up sex would be great, too. Read Fear of Flying. I saw that on your bookshelf, too. I think it’ll make you nice and horny and maybe (hopefully) back to normal. But back to Facebook, I have poked you, flung Brie at you, attacked you with my heavy metal zombie and sent you a beer, and what do I get from you? Nothing. Is breaking up this hard to do? Why can’t you communicate your feelings? I mean, I’m assuming you defriended the rest of your Facebook friends because you are closing up, like a little tortoise in a broken shell. Come out, fair turtle! I also sent you poop via the U.S. Mail but I was drunk and it probably won’t get there anyway. Ever read Post Office? The guy is drunk all the time and probably sends boxes to all sorts of crazy places.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, let’s discuss this business of your “seeing other people.” What people? Date people? Baby, that’s only going to crush your spirit. We’re both going to need to grieve a while over this and (I’m not promising anything here) we might “get back together.” Look at Love in the Time of Cholera! Everybody got cholera and died but met up later on a boat, all transformed into zombies. Loving, Latin zombies. I know how much you freak out at that kind of romance. Hell, we could just go to Italy! You know? Just take off, not as boyfriend/girlfriend, but just two nude people who love it here on this private beach. It’s just like A Farewell to Arms. I’m a soldier, you’re a nurse and we have super-babies that eventually rid the world of the robots that appear in George Orwell’s Signet Classic 1984. Sometimes I also imagine we have our own waiters that come out and bring us piña coladas, but then I try and be realistic.

Well, babe. It’s going to be alright, I think. How about we try meeting again face-to-face about all this. Like the culminant scene between the Judge and the Kid in Blood Meridian? All primal, violent love and hints of forced sodomy and cannibalism. And maybe this time, with not so many attorneys around? I don’t want this thing to go down all Madame Bovary on us.