CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
“It doesn’t matter how smooth the road has been so far;
There will always be potholes ahead!”
“JayJay….I have to tell you something…..it’s over” Ellie said to me on the other end of the phone as soon as I answered.
I knew this day was coming, I had spent weeks preparing for it, and yet hearing her say it, those words stabbed me like the sharpest knife in the world. Without responding at all I burst into tears. Tears that had been brewing inside me for weeks on end, just waiting for the final nail in my coffin of love. The kind of tears that you only cry once in your entire life, the day your first love tells you she is breaking up with you. Those tears flowed down my face, like the time when I was five and my brother decided to urinate on my head, and I just took it and let it drip right down my face into my mouth, sour and disgusting, and oh so wet. Those tears came with sobs too. The sobs which mothers make when they find out after a week long negotiation with her baby’s abductor, that he had already killed her son, and all hope was lost. Losing all hope is the saddest moment in anyone’s life. I was sobbing so hard that I didn’t even hear what Ellie was saying next, until she repeated it several times
“No JayJay, not with you, not with you, No JayJay, not with you, not with you’ she said over and over until I finally registered
“What?”
“I am not ending it with you…I have ended it with Brad, with Brad its over, I love you, I want to be all yours”
Then there was a knock on the door. I walked over and opened it up, and there was Ellie with her cell phone in her hand. She looked at me for about one second then threw her arms around me. Then kissed my wet lips. Then again I broke out crying. I cried the tears you only cry once in your life. The tears you cry when the greatest moment of your life is a possibility and the worst moment of your life is also a possibility, and its teetering on the edge, and your nerves are as shot as a drug dealer sentenced to face the firing squad in Thailand for trying to smuggle heroin up his rectum, and its coming down to this moment, the worst moment or the best – then incredibly it’s the best. The single happiest moment in your life! And your body just doesn’t know how to react to such intense joy. It has never had to deal with this before. So it responds in the way it had dealt with extreme emotion before, usually pain, so you cry. You sob like a woman who as a result of being rapped when she was twelve has been told her whole life that she could never bear children, and still desperate to be a mother she never gave up hope, and so painful operations later, and years of daily hormone injections, and years of expensive IVF procedures, and many, many times being told that the most recent time was again a failure, and then the unbearable heart break of finally conceiving only to have the baby disappear from her via a bloody miscarriage, to now when she finally, finally has carried a baby to full term, and after a whole night of agonizing labor, and fears for the babies health, she holds her healthy new born daughter in her arms, while her loving husband strokes its small crop of hair . I was sobbing so hard I didn’t even hear what Ellie was saying next, until she repeated it over and over “I love you JayJay, I love you JayJay, I love you JayJay”. “I love you too my Ellie Belly” I replied.
Ellie and I spent the night making such good love that they should have filmed us and made it into an instructional video. I then slept that great sleep of someone who is both physically exhausted and mentally exhilarated, and woke up with a smile so wide it could barely fit in my apartment. I was buzzing with excitement. I actually was in love, I was actually loved, and it was actually the same person, how unbelievable!
We had made plans for her to come around that night after work, she just had to go home first to collect some clothes so she had clothes to wear for the next couple of days, when she would be spending the night at my place, yes you heard me right, I had a beautiful, wonderful girl coming over, and she was planning to stay with me, in my place, in my bed, for days, where we would have colossal amounts of sex, spend more time hugging than a prisoner spends in his cell, and just be together all the time. I was higher than any crack addict in the world.
As you can probably imagine I had little else on my mind this morning. Hannah called up to see if I wanted to hang out, and for basically the first time in my life I actually said no to her. I just wanted to think about Ellie. I didn’t want my mind distracted from it. When you have had some of the experiences which I have had over the years, then you spend lots of your time trying to forget about them, but I was now building up a memory bank of happy memories, memories which I could call on anytime I ever needed a lift, and I wanted to think about them over and over again until they were burned into my brain.
I thought about going and seeing Ellie at work, but I knew she didn’t want me to. Still I needed to let her know in someway that she was on my mind today. I thought about what I could do for ages. I could send her a text message. But that’s hardly the most romantic thing in the world. I could call up and have her paged, but that’s just bound to piss her off, especially if she was with customers and lost a commission.
Then I decided the best idea was to have something waiting for her when she got home, some kind of present. I had never sent anyone flowers before, not that I am not romantic, I love the thought of doing something nice like that for a loved one, but I just had never had anyone in the world who wouldn’t just get scared to death to receive flowers from me. So that’s what I decided to do. I loved the thought of seeing Ellie’s face when she came home with a big bouquet of red roses on her door step. I called up a few florists from the phone book and found one which said they could have them there by the time she got home. Then I hit a snag. “What do you want to write as a message?” the lovely lady on the other end of the phone asked.
“I don’t know” I responded, because I didn’t have a fucking clue in the world “what do most people put?” I asked.
“Can be all sorts of things, a thankyou, a declaration of love, a poem you have written, anything you want really” She replied.
“Ok I’ll get back to you”
“What to write, what to write, what to write” I thought in my head over and over, until I realized I wasn’t even thinking about what to write, I was thinking about just those words, and was slipping into some unplanned meditation zone.
“I love you Ellie, I am so glad you have broken up with your boyfriend” Hhhhmmm nah, not that romantic
“Ellie making love to you is like spending time in heaven with Jesus” Maybe a bit too homosexual and sacrilegious
“Ellie my belly, I like being with you more than watching tele” Too crap
“Every day I spend with you is like spending a day happier than I have ever been, even though we have never actually spent a day together, in fact I have barely ever seen you in sunlight, well actually have I ever seen you at sunlight?” No
“I love my Ellie oh yes I do, I love my Ellie, that is who” No
“Ellie is quite contrary I like her better than Mary” No
“When the work day ends, Ellie comes to me, that’s the way I like it to be” No
“I told you my name was JayJay, that was unusual for me, that’s what you did to me” No
“I fell in love with you at first site, I can’t wait for you to stay the night” Getting better, but no
“One day I was sad and all alone, but since I met you I’ve really grown” Good start, but no
“Brad is sad, because I have you, and I am glad” No
“Hannah told me that I would get laid soon, and I have that thanks to you” No
“These are getting fucking worse JayJay, better think of something soon” I thought, then I decided the problem might be that a quick jive like that is not long enough to say how I really feel, maybe I should try writing a poem. This was my first attempt
Ellie I saw you on the warehouse floor
I had to lean against a wall
To stop from falling on my face
To stop the spinning in that place
My heart was floating in the air
I just watched it float up there
Hoping you would see it above
And share with me all your love
I didn’t get with you that day
I thought my chance had gone away
But I saw you on a train at night
You gave me such a pleasant fright
And we talked like old friends
And I didn’t want the trip to end
I called you up on the phone
I no longer felt all alone
We had dinner and a hug
We rolled around on my rug
And now you’re all for me
You didn’t know how happy I could be
Tonight is my biggest dream come true
I couldn’t be happier than to be with you
I was very pleased with this effort. Hey who knew I could write a poem? But I wasn’t quite satisfied. It was just a little too literal. Ellie knew our story, but she also knew the part Brad played in it. I didn’t want this poem to remind her of her betrayal, just of how happy we were going to be together. So I tried again. This is my second effort.
True love only comes around
When the moon is blue
When it strikes you down
You feel your flowers bloom
For so long now my
Flowers have done nothing but die
My crushes have ended
With me having a cry
But then you came into my life
I’m not sure why
And my flowers rose up
With colors so true
And it’s because of this
I’m so in love with you
What do you think? I was very happy with this. It was just what I hoped it would be. I might not be a wordsmith. I might not be about to write a book of romantic poems, but for an amateur, sending his first bouquet of roses, and his first poem to the girl he loves, how much better could it have been? I called up the florist again, and shyly read it over the phone for the lady to write onto the card, “That’s very sweet”; she said when I was done. This made me feel good. And she promised my poem and the roses would be on Ellie’s doorstep by the time she got home.
This was still three hours away. Ellie still had to pack up when she got home, and come over. So I wasn’t expecting to see her for about four hours. This was going to be a very hard four hours to kill. Staring at a clock for some reason makes the hands go really, really slowly. I tried doing some drawings, did some Explosion Man, but I just wasn’t in the mood for the battles of Explosion Man versus his evil brother Desert Fire. I tried drawing a picture of Ellie just from my memory of her. And then decided that either I was a very ordinary face drawer, or that I actually had a mutant coming around to see me that night, “Could I possibly of fallen in love with a mutant, is love really that blind?” I thought to myself. I went for a run; sport is usually great to take your mind off things. However running is not! Running is great to think of things over and over again.
I tried watching TV. There was only crap Saturday afternoon TV on. Some crap movie from 1972 or something, about a short man and how his love for horses was making it hard for him to love his women. Then there was a documentary about the lives of the world’s deadliest spiders, and they kept showing footage of spiders running through people’s bed linen, and hiding in their shoes, not pleasant things to think of. Then there was a crappy reality dating show, this one was a competition to see a guy answering a serious of questions, which three girls had already responded to. They were questions like “How long after you have fallen for someone do you want to sleep with them” and then multiple choice answers. And in the end he is introduced to the girls. And he has to pick which one he likes the most, and if the one he chooses he thinks is most attractive is the same one he matched the most with from the questions, then they got to go on a date all expenses paid. The whole thing was fatally floored from the beginning, because the guy was just some average guy, he didn’t look that much different from me, and the girls were all really pretty, but this show was based on the idea that all three of the girls wanted to date him, which is about as likely as finding three girls who all want to go to a bar prowling for boys, with a plan of buying all the cute ones drinks, and taking one home each for a hot night of sex. That’s just not realistic. Girls are not that easy. He guessed wrong anyway. He chose the prettiest of the girls, and matched best with the least pretty. I think it was all a scam to show guys as being chauvinistic and only caring about looks, and to try and teach us that the real best match for you isn’t necessarily the prettiest. That’s just stupid though. When are they going to teach girls not to judge a book by its cover for once? We’ve been coping this ‘men are shallow’ crap for decades, but you girls are just as bad.
Anyway, TV was distracting enough that three and a half hours had gone past before I began staring at the door just waiting for it to shudder from the force of a fist hitting it. When it finally did shudder, it shudded way more than I was expecting from cute little Ellie. Still when I opened the door I was a little surprised to find in front of me a large round chubby sort of fattish, man with a neat office like hair cut, and an outfit which looked slightly too small, clean shaven and smelling like he worked in a perfume factory, yet with a face that suggested he answered calls on a complaints line all day.
He looked remarkably familiar, until he said
“I can’t believe it’s you” With a voice both angry and laced with sadness
Then it hit me, it was Brad.
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