"Buzz, buzz, buzz."
She rolled over, hit the snooze button on her alarm, looked at her clock and did the math.
Ninety days, eight hours, twenty nine minutes and a few seconds later and she still felt the pain as much that morning as she did the night he broke her heart. She rolled back over and hid her face under her comforter.
"Not again," she thought. Not another day of missing him, hating him and the sad gloom that hung around a broken heart. She couldn't take another day like that. But after 90 days of no escape, she had no idea how to not feel this way. She had no idea how to make it stop.
She had never been a "girlfriend" girl. She was not the girl a guy wanted to bring home to mom. She wasn't rude, violent, deceitful or harsh, but she still wasn't the kind of girl guys dated. Yes, she had been out on plenty of dates, but she learned early on she wasn't meant for monogamous relationships. She didn't know if it was all guys, or just the guys she attracted, but the guys in her world lied. They cheated. They disappeared without an explanation. And they used her to help them cheat on their girlfriends. She always walked into a first date with an open mind and a willingness to wipe the slate clean, but she couldn't escape this image the male species had of her, no matter how hard she tried. She didn't know how she earned that image but she couldn't hide it.
So she learned to accept the fate the universe had placed on her. She wasn't a "girlfriend" girl. She was a fun first, second or third date. She was a fun time at the bar. She could make a guy laugh, forget about his hectic day and give him a thrill or two. And she liked her new role. She liked ruffling a few beer-soaked feathers. She liked making heads turn and shocking an unsuspecting target. A few hours of meaningless, harmless fun added a little skip in her step, bumped up her self-esteem and gave her a funny story to share the next time she and her friends met up at the nail salon.
She wasn't expecting him. Another weekend on the road meant another weekend of hotel rooms, required party appearances, a little flirtatious behavior and a return to reality on Monday. She wasn't looking for anything or anyone to bombard her thoughts and still be invading her thoughts and her world the next week or month.
The minute he grabbed her arm and her attention, she should have known she was doomed. He had all the right lines. He made all the right moves. He pushed all the right buttons and played on all of her fears. For the first time, she wasn't running toward the door. She had conversations with him about things she had never considered, let alone talked about before — moving down south, meeting his family, becoming a step-mother. These ideas that usually made her hyperventilate didn't seem to phase her. She didn't even freak out when, after only knowing him for a day, he introduced himself to her father. No guy had ever met her dad, but she didn't flinch.
She did tell herself to take things slow. No matter how much her brain jumped ahead to what a year or two from now would look like, she didn't let herself act on those mental pictures. She didn't want to scare him or find out what her own limit was. Yet, her mind kept picturing her future. Maybe it was making up for lost time because she had never pictured anything past 2:30 a.m. with a guy before. She forgot what it was like to go out with a guy in the daylight. And he knew that.
He knew about her past issues and insecurities. He swore he was different. She told him he wasn't real and he swore he was a real man and would prove it to her. He was confident they had a future, and when he said it she believed it, too. He was so adamant, her only choice was to believe him.
She couldn't have been more wrong. The dark side of love is ignoring and forgiving the bad behavior. The constant excuses that came flying out of her mouth that explained his silence or disappearance flowed too easily. She was willing to give him every benefit of the doubt. It worried her but she tried to tell herself love wasn't always sunny and he needed her. He said he needed her.
But she never counted on him needing someone else. She hadn't counted on a miss sent text message that was never meant for her eyes. She never expected him to crawl under a rock and take the coward's way out. She never expected it could hurt this much or last this long. Not only was her heart pulverized, never to be put back together again, but she mourned a life she would never have. A life with him. While he disappeared quicker than she could have ever imagined, the pretty pictures he painted in her head haunted her. And she was tired of it.
She still talked to him like he was in front of her. She cried whenever she talked about it. She replayed moments in her head. She reread his texts, trying to understand how someone could say what he did and not mean it. She desperately searched for an explanation. Her friends told her it would get better and she would be fine, but she didn't think so. She had been messed with and tormented before. It was not the first time a guy lied and used her to cheat. But she had never had someone play on her fears, push her buttons and lie so convincingly for so long.
As much as she never expected him to pop into her life in the first place, she never, ever, expected him to randomly pop up on day 91. But there it was. A message that sent her spiraling. For weeks, she jumped every time her phone made a peep, hoping for a message or a tidbit of information to explain what the hell had happened. But she slowly excepted his cowardly side. So when he came back around, she froze.
Four hours and about a dozen messages later, he finally goaded her into responding. It infuriated her that he was trying to make jokes and small talk, trying to act like nothing happen. She couldn't pretend. She didn't know how. The wounds were still raw and the pain and anger were always hovering on the surface waiting for the chance to choke her alive. And yet he wanted to catch up.
"I would like to stay friends."
That was the last straw. She tried to weasel an answer out of him but he dodged every advance. But there was no way she could be friends with him. She went from not knowing he existed, to racking up frequent flier miles, to falling in love, to having her biggest fears played out in real time, to a broken heart in less than six months. Where in there was a friendship formed that was worth salvaging?
What made it worse was she believed he had one of two thoughts running through his little damaged brain: A. He didn't think his games caused any damage and they could pick up where they left off or 2. He believed his damage was so minuscule that she should be over it by now and not have any residual hurt feelings toward him. Either way, it hurt like hell. Either way, he was dead wrong.
"We were never friends."
She left it short and sweet. There were a million words running through her head, screaming at him and asking questions, but she knew it would all be a waste of time. She knew she would never get her answers. She knew he would never understand what he did to her or how much it hurt. She knew he would never regret what he did.
"Buzz, buzz, buzz."
She rolled over, hit the snooze button on her alarm, looked at her clock but didn't do the math. Since she had tried everything in 91 days to get him out of her head and her heart, she decided to try something new. Trickery.
People trick themselves everyday: no one will really notice that test is gone, those calories don't count, no one will know if we only go in there for a minute, if I don't pee on the stick it won't be real. If other people could trick themselves into believing those things, she could trick herself out of believing something.
"It doesn't matter," she told herself. "It doesn't hurt anymore."
She figured is she said it enough, her heart would catch on.
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