vultures.

Her name was Vanessa, and she doesn’t want me anymore. Had she ever? Every day after us I ask this question. Her hair was more blonde than strawberry; her face was pale, and she was everything. I miss her.

We were happy. It was like a disease, and it engulfed her. She had eaten us up every day for six years and now she was through — through gorging herself on our feelings, and our passion, and our sick, obsessive “us.” She didn’t want to have me anymore.

People don’t do this. They don’t talk about relationships like an insufferable meal. Even the best thing isn’t something you want every single moment of every single day. You need variety, and she stopped fighting it; she stopped fighting that urge to eat shitty take-out. 

David was shitty take-out. And she knew it. She knew it, I knew it, and she didn’t care. Because, that’s how we are. That’s how every fucking person is. If it wasn’t her, it would have been me. The truth is, it could have so easily been me eating shitty take-out. But because of how timing works, I get the benefit of being the one left. Whatever benefit that is.

I read a passage recently in one of those self-help books that really only helped the person who wrote it feel better when they were down. My mom sent it to me after she found out about David and Vanessa. Vanessa had been the one to tell her. That’s the fucking balls of it. That gaul. The fucking nerve. I had successfully avoided the preying eyes of my mother from two-thousand miles away during the first weeks of our split. My mother, a subtle vulture, who just can’t stop herself from snapping at my dying body in the middle of the Mojave. 

The passage said this…it said: Most people who don’t look life squarely in the eye want to avoid what’s making them unhappy.

Vanessa was unhappy, until she wasn’t — until she looked me in the eyes.

She was a mouth, and I was the lukewarm taste that that mouth couldn’t help but spit out the window from the apartment we used to share.

I live here now. Alone. And it’s ok. She left mostly everything, so now I have a floral bedspread I don’t want, a key holder sign that signifies that I’m “home” in cursive, her contact case, and a million other pieces of her. I don't wear contacts. 

Her soft ruby lips, flakey from being in the sun too long, the freckles that dusted across her collarbone, the delicacy of her fingers brushing along the ridge of my brows moments after an uncontrollable desire to press everything about ourselves together. She would kiss me, and every few minutes, she would separate our faces, look at me, like she was trying to memorize me, and then just as I was ready to kiss her again, she would breathe me in, wrecking me for anyone else. I couldn't believe she was mine. 

And I should have known. 

Why? 

I don’t know.