Can’t Keep a Good Girl Down: Chapter 1
The beginning of a tale on love, loss, grief, and(eventual) healing, set in the bars, clubs, and honky-tonks of mid-90s Nashville.
See what you lost when you left this world
This sweet old world…
— Lucinda Williams
In two weeks and one day, John left me twice. When he left the first time, on August 22, 1995, he broke my heart. When he left forever, on September 6, 1995, he broke all of me.
For his first exit, he brings a six-pack of Shiner Bock. When I see him standing on the front stoop, unannounced, six-pack in hand, I think maybe, just maybe, he was overcome with emotion and wanted to confess his never-ending love like Jon Cusack in Say Anything. Has any man ever really done that? Play a boom box outside their love’s window…and not get carried away by the police? This is my John, not movie Jon. My John isn’t mushy like that. There must be something wrong. Did someone die?
He strides purposefully up the stairs and makes himself comfortable on my bedroom floor. He cracks open a bottle using the opener attached to his wad of keys and takes a long swig. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” he says. Just like that.
So there it is: my first relationship with any sort of real long-term potential, done after only a year. Another one down — another good man, leaving for no good reason.
John offers me a beer, which I turn down. He takes another pull off his and says, “The logical next step would be to move in together, but I don’t want to go there. I care about you — you’re great, you really are, you’re such a sweet person — but I don’t think I want that kind of commitment with you.”
I can’t say anything. I sit on the floor, facing him, shaking inside. He starts talking again.
“Look. We’re not soul mates, so we should both be free to find ours.”
For some reason, I’m not enough. My mind is spinning. I gave my everything to you. You’re my best friend. Except for the fact that you cut your shaggy blonde hair short and didn’t want to go out last weekend, I didn’t even know you were unhappy.
Of course I don’t say any of that. I’m too passive, too agreeable, an insecure 24-year-old. His words have crushed me, but I won’t let him see me cry. So I sit quietly and stare at a spot on the wall behind him and visualize that there’s a little man building a brick wall around my heart so I won’t have to go through this again. Literally. That’s what I imagined. After getting little response from me, he finally leaves, his head hung, his eyes watery, a now-five pack of decent beer under his right arm.
I would never see him again.
After one lonely week, which included my first Friday night at home in years, I call him. I miss sharing the minutia of the day with him. Dangit. “We started out as friends, and that’s the most important thing to me,” I say, a tiny crack forming in my new wall. “It doesn’t make sense to never talk to each other again.”
John seems relieved, even happy, that we can reconcile, and tells me about a party going on over Labor Day weekend. Probably for the best that it is with a Lynyrd Skynyrd-lovin’ crowd I don’t hang around with much; otherwise, I would have stayed there all night just to be near John while pretending that I didn’t want to. I’m still hurt by the loss of our romance, but I’ll forgive him. After I heal a bit more, maybe we can joke around like when my friends and his used to accidentally on purpose meet at the Gold Rush after a show at the Exit/In. Maybe we could get back together even…
I would never talk to him again.
