Aug 26, 2018
Mistakes Had Been Made
by Tommy Paley
I knew she was leaving.
Even before she was fully aware of it herself.
The signs had been on the walls, everywhere, for weeks as if written in that thick black marker that I purchased for her as a present during my last, fateful visit to the office supply store.
She loved office supplies.
And I loved her.
Something I repeated ad nauseum to anyone who would listen: her, my mother, random passersby on the street and my many coworkers who, while wanting to be supportive, were becoming quite adept at playing dead or, when that failed, fleeing the scene, when I approached.
But, it was over.
Doomed from the start my friend, who was all doom and gloom, said from the day it started.
I didn’t want to see the cracks in the igloo that was our love.
I didn’t want to see the igloo the couple next door had built that put our’s to shame.
I also didn’t want to ask what’s with all of the igloos in the first place, we live in the Pacific Northwest.
I would tell myself that I was like a guy from Mars and she was like a woman from Earth as that is where women come from, but even this sad attempt at hackneyed humour couldn’t cheer me up which was saying a lot as hackneyed humour was one of my five favourite types of humour.
She wouldn’t be going poetically, silently into the night.
No, her exit would be in the daytime as it’s much easier to see then, though good street parking is often hard to find.
And it would be rife with drama and accusations and painful statements thrown like darts aimed at my heart and other internal organs meant to keep me up at night for months wondering what her issue with my spleen was.
And those darts would pierce my skin and reduce me to a pile of tears, loose flabby skin and a collection of bones.
I couldn’t avoid reality (it’s everywhere).
Mistakes had been made.
Mostly by me, but a little by her if we are being objective, not that I was keeping actual tallies, I mean I was, but I was using numbers as tallies are a pain to count once you get past 10.
How I wish I could have just pressed rewind or applied a fresh coat of paint.
I knew it was over.
Even when it wasn’t.
The air was thick, really thick with tension.
Like we were living in an apartment badly in need of a humidifier or a Hepafilter.
Or a steam room only without any of the quasi-health benefits and old men wrapped loosely with towels.
How did we get here? And why? And where we going?
The only question I could answer was who and, even then, I was only receiving partial credit.
Why was my life constantly imitating bad afterschool television programs for teens and not the minimally better television programs for young adults?
Tune in to next week’s program where he hilariously continues to embarrass himself by promising to change while she privately makes plans to go to Club Med alone.
And, though, the history books may go easy on me, as I was innocent, mostly.
I knew it was my fault.
Mistakes had been made.
I was young — hard to believe I was ever that young — and naive (believing I was that naive is easy).
That particular brand of excitable that comes when a young man experiences love or lust for the first time or is given access to all-you-can-eat cheese and crackers.
She was my first.
And I dove into this thing we had head first and with guns ablazin’.
I was so in love I was mismatching socks, pairing fish with cheese and forcing disparate idioms and expressions together in my writing and I didn’t care.
What a time to be alive!
I just loved everything about her — her eyes, her hair, the combination of her eyes and hair when viewed together and her name. I could just say her name for hours while sitting waiting at a bus stop with no interest in actually taking public transit.
Ours was a cliched coupling.
I made sure of it.
Brunches on patios and walks on the beach with sandals draped over shoulders, usually our own, but we weren’t picky; picnics on top of hills to allow us to both literally and figuratively look down on others and crosswords on the couch on Sunday mornings with freshly baked muffins.
Whatever the game was, we were winning and constantly eating muffins.
Until we weren’t.
A short-lived merger of two celestial bodies with intersecting orbits that somehow ended in a cataclysmic collision that, evidently, surprised no one especially my friend who is an astronomer.
The moments when we intersected were among my favourites, and I allowed myself to fantasize of our union like when separate states join and form a powerful united country.
What can I say, I find nation building hot especially when it involves me and a human female playing the roles of the nations.
But it all ended.
I guess I should have seen it coming.
Mistakes had been made.
I’ll never forget the look on her face on that fateful morning.
Or the look right after the first look.
I can’t recall any of the other facial expressions that followed, though I’m sure she continued to make them — she was like that as a person.
“I’m leaving,” she said, using her words when, honestly, raisins or Cheerios organized into letters would have sufficed.
And then she did.
The news hit me like a ton of bricks, and I should know, as I had experimented once with having a ton of bricks thrown at me just in case I ever needed to make the comparison.
Ouch.
Blindsided by this news that she wasn’t happy and hadn’t been happy for quite some time.
I just knew I’d be blindsided by something eventually what with my walking around with my eyes closed so much of the time.
Turns out with each passing day, her smile was less and less of a genuine smile and more of a something experts on the internet refer to as “not a smile unless viewed upside down”.
My world had been turned upside down.
And inside out and had holes poked in it like it was a giant inflatable pink elephant which, up until the age of 7, I believed it was.
I knew something had been wrong between us for a long time.
See, I took that tea leaf reading course at the local community college.
“How could I have been so stupid?” I asked my closest friends who had quite the lengthy, detailed and well-explained responses complete with bar graphs and well-organized handouts.
I sat on a chair in my room (because that’s generally what chairs are for) and pondered what went wrong, with my purchasing of this chair not being one of them as it was a great chair.
One thing was clear — my new prescription glasses — really the people down at the local optometry clinic do A+ work.
Another thing was, that I had made mistakes and there was no going back in time to fix them mostly because she made it clear from day 1 that she purposely failed the unit on temporal physics on principle alone.
I spent my days wandering around like a lost soul.
How cliched, but, honestly, what else are lost souls meant to do (seriously, that’s an actual question)?
A man without a purpose.
A man also without a hat as I was between hats at the time.
Cursing myself for making mistake upon mistake upon mistake with not having a new hat being only one of them.
Like the relationship rookie that I was.
Falling flat on my face.
Then, after taking a short break, falling on it again, repeatedly almost like it was fun — which it wasn’t — unless you were the sort of person who enjoyed falling a lot which I wasn’t, though looks can be deceiving.
Time with her had been amazing.
It picked me up out of the hole that I was in and placed me on the ground in close proximity to the hole so that I could observe the hole and, when ready, lease it out to someone else needing a hole to hang out in.
Time with her changed me, I’d become a hopeless romantic whose clothes were incrementally more billowy and who stopped and smelled the roses and pondered the existence of clouds.
Allowing myself to dream.
Of us, together, running naked on the beach holding medium-priced linens above our heads hoping for flight.
I could see now that I’d erred.
I’d made the mistake of running before I could walk, of walking before I could crawl and of crawling around on all fours, barking like a dog being filmed by her to be posted online because she thought that was hilarious.
I’d made the mistake of looking into her eyes and speaking about living together using two pieces of Playdough to help demonstrate.
I’d made the mistake of talking and, once, rapping about marriage and kids and then training those kids to sing in perfect harmony before entering regional singing competitions.
And, early on, she was my partner in crime, gleefully excited about what was to come.
Until she wasn’t.
I couldn’t let her go, even though she insisted, in calligraphy, that I must.
Late night phone calls pleading for another chance, to show that I could change, that I could erase my mistakes, that I could grow a full beard, even though I couldn’t.
But, she was gone.
At least the girl I loved and whom I thought had loved me.
That person no longer existed.
And though I thought I would never be happy again, in time, I was.
As the days and weeks went by and the pages of the calendar demanded to be flipped forcing me to purchase new calendars, I saw our time together in a new light only partially because I had upgraded to high efficiency light bulbs.
She was my stepping stone, while I was for her, a small boulder that could be stepped on with the correct footwear.
I could see that the fatal mistakes I’d made, in my relative youth, that I’d spent hours blaming myself and trying to literally tear my hair out over but that is actually really hard to do, prepared me for what was to come.
And when I met Miss Right (name changed to maintain anonymity) I was ready.
