A View to Admire

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera once wrote this of love: “… loves are like empires – when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too fade away.”
If I were to choose the single idea that held up the seething monument that was my first love, I would assume that it was innocence. Our love was that of two children who had never known the maps of other people’s body. We were each others cartographers and nobody else’s. Hence, after the split, we both reached out and grabbed the closest piece of flesh we could, and made love to the sin, and with each thrust into the other’s body, we snipped at the final strings of innocence. And so, the monument’s foundations were rocked like bedposts, until finally, it crumbled before our eyes. Up until that moment we shoved our respective tongues in other people’s mouths, I do believe we were still capable of fixing what we broke. But the damage was done. We stood in the rubble of what was our former love, blankly starring each other in the eye, incapable of comprehending the repercussions of the actions made in other people’s sheets. All we could do was stand in disbelief of what once was a love to swear by, holding bits and pieces of the grand puzzle, vainly attempting to find fuel in the fossils to rekindle the fire.
It was a view to admire.

July 25, 2007.
That is the exact date which will forever be engraved into the stone tablet that is my most infallible memory that Disney is full of shit. Yes!
Disney is full of shit.
Since I can remember, I grew drunk on the optimistic ideals promised to me through the innumerable movies produced, animated, and directed by the grand American ideological propaganda machine that is The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS). They never once mentioned how cruel people could be when they are willing to wash two years down the drain for an older guy with a desk job and a new Mercedes Benz. They preached nothing but rainbows and butterflies.
October 16, 1923.
That’s the date when brothers Walt and Roy Disney created the hideous monstrosity of DIS. That was the beginning of the end for the respective sanity and love life of Americans everywhere. And people wonder why divorce is on the rise…

So here I am, sitting at a coffee shop, nervously tapping my fingers on top of the wooden table, trying to gather what ever coherent thoughts run across my jumbled conscious, into some linear train of thought. But as I check the watch, with every sweep of the second hand, the task grows more and more seemingly impossible. I look at all the others around and I can’t help but wonder if they can sense that two former lovers were soon to congregate for the first time in months, and all for some simple, idiotic reason (I’ll get to why later).
And as I’m tapping my fingers, I can’t help but think that this isn’t at all how I wanted our final goodbye to be like. I wanted something dramatic, perhaps set in some Paris café in the bustling Latin Quarter, on a dark, stormy day. I wanted rain to run down the window, I wanted an Export ‘A’ Light cigarette resting on my lips, and I wanted something wonderfully appropriate to be gently playing from the speakers – the Beatles, “I’ll Follow the Sun” off of Beatles for Sale. Yes! That is exactly what I would want playing. “One day you’ll know/ I was the one/ But tomorrow may rain so/ I’ll follow the sun.” Not too loud where it would drown our dialogue, but loud enough to where she and everyone would notice that someone’s heart was on the verge of breaking. But instead I have to settle for a cookie cutter Starbucks, a warm day in February, sun shinning through the windows, birds chirping outside, and some cheery Tony Bennet song blaring from the speakers.
That’s when she walks in, wearing dark wash Hudson jeans and a black Lacoste polo. She takes off her sunglasses as the door swings closed behind her and she takes a look around, her soft brown hair radiating in the sunshine. She should be drenched, miserable and cold, with mascara running down her face. Damn her.
She walks up and sits down.
“Hey, how are you?” she spits with a sassy smile, while chewing gum. Orbit probably. I hate how I know this. I hate how I know that at this very instant she is chewing Orbit Sweet Mint gum. I hate how I know that the only reason she hasn’t rushed to order the biggest mocha frappacino is because the squeeze of her jeans was a bit more than usual and she’s probably starting some low-carb diet. I hate how I know she probably isn’t wearing any underwear because she never wears underwear, and once upon a time only I knew this. Now the number’s rising.
This is one of the worst things about serious break ups: you still know everything about that person. You still know their mannerisms, their likes, their dislikes, their soft spots, their hot spots. You know them better than they know themselves and it doesn’t count for shit. All that time you spent admiring them, tenderly recording their actions as they observed yours – that’s all time you’ve got to spend erasing and crossing out when the break up comes. It all amounts to a mountain of mental paper work you have to put in the shredder. But even after you shred the papers, there are still bits and pieces that come up like lint in your jeans.
I don’t say anything in reply and instead retract a letter from my breast pocket. I hand it to her and, from under the table, I hand her a paper bag filled with ashes and soot.
“What is this?” she asks.
“A letter and a bag,” I say.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Read the letter.”
I wait a moment. I invested too much time to just walk away without reaping the visual fruit that’s about to unfold. And sure enough, within a minute of reading the letter, she pulls down her sunglasses over her face, just like I knew she would, and the tears start rolling down from underneath. I listen to the music for a second… Tony Bennet’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Eh, close enough, I figure. And with that, I get up and walk away.

Main points of the letter:
1. Don’t ever talk to me
2. I don’t care about you anymore
3. Our post-relationship friendship isn’t worth it
4. Ernest Hemingway once said (summarized) that you only write for two people: yourself, and the one you love, whether she is dead or alive
5. I no longer write for you, I write for someone new
6. The bag is filled with what’s left of everything you ever gave me

Call me vengeful but I think I’m allowed to be. So as I walked away, I looked at her blushing cheeks and the tears that ran down her face, as she looked through the bag and saw the ashes of all the artifacts I had ever accumulated throughout the history of our love. She was looking at our burned out innocence.
And it was a view to admire.