Life Happens, Dennis Gordon [books to read to improve english txt] 📗

around to bite her in the ass and she may have been waiting for the inevitability of this day all along.
I didn’t want to waste any more time. At that age I felt like I had already lost a pretty sizable chunk of my life to what had turned out to be empty senseless relationships. “I think we need to break up Rena. I’ve been thinking pretty hard about this and in the end it always comes back to this.” Without going into a lot of detail she did not respond well to that statement. First came disbelief. An unwillingness to even process the words and absorb their meaning. That, all too quickly and abruptly shifted to a the much higher gear of flat out pissed. A few harsh words and like a scene from a movie set in the high risk wing of a hospital for the criminally insane she snapped to a soft wounded voice. Even her body language turned on a dime to match her tone. A fair amount of crying and the reemergence of her unwillingness to accept what was happening followed. A lot of back and forth, some yelling but not much. I’m really not certain how long this went on but was enough that I had to excuse myself for a bathroom break.
For an instant I imagined that someone new had arrived during my brief absence because I heard a voice that was eerily childlike and my mind simply did not recognize it. It was unfamiliar in the worst possible way. I came out of the bathroom and moved out of the hallway and back into the area between the living room and the dining area. Whimpering softly the flowing voice came from my right. As I turned my head I noticed that the apartment had grown much darker. Again the voice emerged from the shadowed area near the front door. The voice quavered with a tone that disturbed me. It had not sounded like her at all. More like a young girls’ plea for help. I was cursing the fact that the three women who lived in this apartment felt it necessary to have a vanity mirror lined with hundred watt bulbs that lit the tiny bathroom up like the fucking sun because now my eyes wouldn’t adjust to the darkness. I think she must’ve known that when I came out of the bathroom I was going to forego any further pointless debate and just leave. I couldn’t have been gone for more than two minutes but when I stepped back into that room with her I was to discover that a whole lot of shit can happen in the time it takes to go take a piss. I glanced over to the couch kind of expecting her to still be sitting in the same spot.
But all that was there was the sweater she had been wearing. I remember it was an elegant looking loose knit white sweater and one of sleeves drooped over the edge of the sofa and down to the floor. An instant later I heard a cracked dry whimpering voice near the door.
“I’m so sorry…. I’m so sorry….” The hitching in her chest kept her in a state of gasping and irregular breaths between syllables. She had dimmed this light so that the only light in the apartment was the muted afternoon sun pouring through the sliding glass doors behind the sofa where her sweater now rested. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust from the bright bathroom lights to the now darkened foyer area where she was standing. She had her back pressed against the front door slightly bent forward in an almost bowing posture. Both hands appeared to be placed against the door palms down and it hit me that she had placed herself in a position that would prevent me from easily leaving.
She must have known what I was thinking because I had seriously considered walking out when I came out of the bathroom. I felt as if everything of importance had been said and anything more would be simply dragging out the painful moment for both of us. Her head was hanging down and her face was hidden by waves of chestnut hair. Then she raised her head to meet my gaze. I had never seen an expression so mired in sorrow. confusion and pain. It was a distorted facial expression that seemed to remove all of the familiar facial landscapes that had become so deeply ingrained in my mind as features that had made her so beautiful to me in the beginning. She was unfamiliar to me in this state as if this were a different person who had come in while I was out of the room. Her customarily heavy mascara had begun to disintegrate under what had become a torrent of tears. Dark blackness ran down her face in smeared blotches. And the tears flowed in streaked rivulets marked in that same black as they carried the cosmetic away on their downward path. If I had seen her at some random location, I wouldn’t have known who she was. Her hair had even changed somehow, it was disheveled and askew on her head in a very unnatural way. Like a bad wig that had been put on sideways. She continued with the same tone but a lot of her words had descended into some unintelligible repetitious muttering. I couldn’t understand anything but “sorry”, “didn’t mean it” and “please”. Only one other word uttered through those trembling lips was clear enough to understand and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. “Forgive me!” Everything instantly came into focus. “God No. What did you do?” My heart had begun pounding and my mind raced and as if to answer my question two thin almost black streams of a viscous yet freely flowing liquid trailed down the door behind her. I stared at the dual streams in disbelief as they grew in length in front of me. They seemed to take on a life of their own as they flowed in and out of the common Arcadian pattern of the front door. Following their path not because of the physical elements related to surface friction or the texture of the door itself, but because they wanted to. And they did not slow because they were being constantly replenished by the steady flow from the point of origin.
The rivulets of blood quickly reached the floor and began to pool in thick concentric circular puddles on the tile of the entryway. It’s hard for me to recall each and every singular thought and emotion that was rushing in on me in those first few seconds. The most obvious emotion was the most powerful. Fear. But it intermingled with so many others and each followed in succession adding itself to the mix. Disbelief, sorrow, empathy regret for not having seen this coming and even a level of initial panic. Many thought feelings vied for the top spot within me and each one took its turn. But the singular most powerful emotion was about to rain thunderously down on me.
All at once it rushed through me as the absolute dominant response to this overwhelming and unbelievable situation. In the forefront of my mind where logic rules supremely I was desperately trying to cling to the idea of the right response. That logic told me that pity and kindness were the most appropriate and any subsequent action must follow along that path. These things would be called for in handling an emotionally unstable and clearly hurt young woman who was having difficulty processing and reacting to the situation in which she currently found herself. This was a civil, logical and appropriate human response. That sounds good and sometimes I wished that is what happened.
But it isn’t. Sometimes life is messy and sometimes the better version of ourselves that we convince ourselves is there in the mirror looking back at us every morning does not step forward when we wished that it would. I needed that reflection at this moment. And though I would find over the course of my life that he was very real and would do me proud on numerous occasions at this moment he was elusive. Ephemeral and unattainable. A phantasm born of a need to see the best in ourselves. I don’t think I have ever met anyone who wouldn’t change something in their past given the chance. A bad choice, A misspoken word, a simple regret. None of us wants to see the darkness within but the truth is that it dwells within all of us. It is opportunistic and it is not discriminating or subtle. And we feed it most of the time we don’t even know we are giving it what it needs. We are too busy feeling what the moment has thrust into our life at that moment it grows. Rapidly gaining strength. A force of nature. Like a flash flood. You barely even notice that it is raining or that your clothes were getting wet when you get swept up in a torrent so powerful that when it takes you off your feet and pulls you and under they don’t find your body until a week later ten miles away. And there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop it. When my mind got a firm grasp on her motivation, her self-serving reasoning my darkness tore through its cage doors and roared to the surface. Pain hatred, anger, frustration. These things broke my already tenuous grasp on those feelings of concern, empathy and pity and they fell away into the ether of blackness consuming me. An all-consuming blackness had me in its grip for the first time in my life. Everything she had put me through, all of the lies, the infidelity, the humiliation and embarrassment, even the little stuff like talking about me behind my back all of it fed the darkness. “You selfish psychotic bitch.” I coldly spoke as I walked toward her. I grabbed her arms forcing her to bring them forward. She didn’t fight it. In fact, she relented quickly. I rolled both forearms simultaneously and exposed her wrists. I honestly don’t know what I was expecting to see but the wounds were far worse than I imaged. Both cuts stretched laterally a few centimeters from the heel of the palm. I had no significant medical knowledge at the time but they looked very deep and they were laid open wide enough that the outer edges of each cut seemed to curl up and outward from the center. These were  self-inflicted wounds and for an instant I was locked into the impossible effort of answering the question, How in the hell could you force yourself to cut the second wrist after seeing what you had done to the first? Once again by default I was trying to apply my own rational thought to another persons irrational action in some vain attempt to find a comfortable, understandable answer that I could wrap my mind around. My monochromatic, pedestrian, plodding myopic adolescent mind. But that answer still to this day hasn’t come in any satisfactory form. The next thing that hit me was the sensation of the cold blood that coated my palms as I gripped her forearms. A viscous sticky substance I had never seen or felt in such a large volume. A faint metallic odor wafted upward between us but by the time I had noticed it I was already pulling her across the room back toward the couch. I was walking backwards as I pulled her forward and when we neared the couch I spun around and in a powerful slingshot snap I threw her to the sofa. “You manipulative selfish bitch.” I seethed as I reached up to my shoulder. Gripping the fabric firmly