Donald Dewberry Tells the Truth

There’s no feeling like a broken heart. But then, no feeling is like any other. The truth is, all anyone wants is to complain. All anyone wants is to be mistreated, pushed away. To have an excuse to be left alone.

All I ever wanted was a chance.

When I met you I had no idea you would be the woman I ended up with, or that I would have a chance to be with for a short time, or as long as I want. I guess the part about us ending up together was my own addition to the hallucination, my fantasy that made it all work. It was real to me while we were together, and time is tricky.

We met at a work party, you were the plus one of one of the coworkers at my job. We caught eyes, then talked for hours in the corner of the event, behind some ferns.

It turned out we'd both lived on the same street in the same city during a span growing up, just on opposite sides.

We both saw meaning in it. We wanted the connection to be meaningful, the randomness to have an attraction. Two particles lost in the cosmos, recognizing and moving toward each other later on, a random initial meeting the spark for what would come next.

You were getting married.

No one really wants the kind of love they imagine. No one romanticizes love as much as they do when the object of their desire doesn’t love them back. Have a fish on the line? Only worth something if it gets away. Or if you stop fishing.

You were the one for me. During that year or so.

You got married.

The truth is, everyone is everyone else. Pull back far enough, and we’re all identical. Dots on a sphere. Pull back far enough, and notions of identity are a joke. We’re all the same. From a long enough distance, you and I are interchangeable. We share the same dot, the same beating heart. I can't see you, hear you or touch you.

But you’re here.

I have the fridge door open, the cream cheese keeps sliding off the sour cream in the top rack and falling to the floor. I’m bending over to pick up the cream cheese. The container is empty, the cheese has dislodged and gone under the fridge.

I’m chewing a bagel without cream cheese. “What a waste.”

You don’t say anything.

I'm smart enough to know I'm delusional. Maybe you are too, and all of the other women who come into my life, hinder or help, then leave, with all but their psychic impressions, their handwritten notes and reminders, little tokens of practical magic that get me by when I forget I’m supposed to go through the motions of a day in the life.

I have been made interchangeable, for the souls who search to fill traumas with spare parts. Or perhaps it is the fleeting exchanges of presence, these moments we give each other, that last forever even once we’re no longer around. Influence lasts.

We're each recyclable. All the matter in the world is a tiny deposit of heavy elements drifting in a sea of black. A tiny dot of inconsequential thoughts, relationships, and lives. What are a few more or a few less dramas?

Pull back far enough and your closest friend is an alien. Far enough and humanity ceases to hold any sympathy. Just more ants. From far enough away who would feel bad about killing one? Snuffing out something so small? Pull back far enough, and understand that no god would hold out against the temptation.

Everything happens for a reason. We're not the right size to see the reason.

You were placed near me, for a moment, in the spime of our timelines, then again, then again and again. Entities interacting in spacetime.

Briefly. Repeatedly.

No one will remember us. After enough time, we never existed. Life, this thing no one understands, it’s the only thing between you and everyone else. Die, and join the biggest club around. When you’re dead not a whole lot’s changed. Like being alive, except you don't need to hold on to who you are.

If only you’d loved me...what? Who are you? Who am I? What is love?

You got divorced. You sent me an email.

All our lives we wait. For those times when everything is perfect, when we gain the things we yearn for. The truth is, not a thing in the world can make anyone happy. Always looking forward to something familiar to make you feel better, always fearing to lose what you know you will. Everything is the same as nothing. If you’re not happy with everything, you might strip happiness of its pedestal, give up looking for it. Sometimes giving up is the best and only thing to do.

You moved in. You got us a cat, and we started talking to each other through it. We watched movies, sometimes, and mostly we did our own thing. You made sweaters on the couch. I talked to you with beer tongue from behind my keyboard or game controller. I was high, and when I wasn't I was cranky. I was mean. I thought I was above being thoughtful. You slept, I didn’t sleep. You thought I was a slob. I thought you were blind to my distress.

You moved out.

I stopped ordering groceries. I canceled the monthly toilet paper. Stopped doing laundry. Stopped shaving.

You got back with your ex, he was dying. He died.

I read his obituary. It wasn’t kind to you.

I wasn’t kind to you, but perhaps it was because I didn’t think you would leave.

Behind us on the couch a pine burned map of the city we shared started to split up the middle. By the time the map split completely in two, you were gone.

No one wants to die. Dying is the devil we don't know. Every suicide a failed rescue. Every jumper would instinctively sprout wings if they could. People don’t know what death is, and they stay away. If you could show them the other side of death, the suicide rate would boom. People don’t stick around because this world is anything special. They do it because the other is beyond comprehension. The truth is, people aren’t afraid of what they understand.

Two months after you left, you came back. In my dreams, during the day. I dream better during the day because I’m awake in more other realities during the day, and I’m less likely to get dream interference from any sidewise me.

In those other realities you didn’t leave, there was no longer any ex to return to. You were settled with the idea of settling. I would be offended, but here I am, sleeping days away to spy on other sidewise yous. There are other women, too, that I don’t recognize, but dreams of them are just as pleasant.

When I was young my father impressed on me the importance of being awake through the day, and sleeping at night, and getting up early. My body clock wasn’t wound for that schedule, and so my whole life I felt like a lazy failure. I feel most alert somewhere around midnight, and don’t sleep until three or four in the morning, rising around noon. The hardest part has been sloughing the stigma around being awake at night, and my brain’s demand for occasional sunlight.

Now I spend my days with you. We’re back together, somestream, and somestream else.

When I’m awake it’s a series of motions and rituals. The cat reminds me of those, with meows and outstretched claws.

Every decision I don’t make, I can live it anyway, by dreaming about another me who made the decision. I don’t know if it’s a bane or a boon. I do know I can’t tell anyone about it or I would no longer be considered mentally healthy. I do know that I’m tired of riding all of the lives, that it’s more signal than I have input for.

I’m thinking about what it will be like to be nothing. It will be like nothing. No thought. No curiosity, no yearning. No identity. No desire.

The truth is, no one really wants to live. We just don’t know any better.