I haven’t spoken to Sophia in three months.
I have been reluctant to mention this to you, fearing you think I am hopelessly pining for us to get back together, which is not the case at all. Â But I’m a sentimental fool, and I was still hoping for a different sort of ending to our long journey together, one where we could joke with each other about our new lives post-divorce, like two ex-lovers in a romantic comedy. Instead, we burned bridges.
I was depressed about this for a month, as if the past dozen years were a waste of my time, but as time crept on, I acknowledged that sometimes you need to learn, love, grow, and move on. By month three, I found myself spending more time worrying about a faraway woman in New Zealand than making peace with the past.
The first week after the blowout was intense. She blocked my phone number. She blocked my landline and my cell phone. Â She blocked my mother’s cell phone. Â My last attempt to fix things was one of pure desperation — walking down the block to the public phone outside the liquor store, a spot usually reserved for lonely late night phone card calls to foreign countries.
I placed four quarters into the slot. I wiped the receiver with my t-shirt, concerned about exotic germs. I dialed Sophia’s home number. And nothing. I lost all of my money. The phone was rigged the phone so the coins became stuck in the slot. I battered the phone with my fist, like a bully. Â The phone laughed at me.
“Fuck it,” I said, taking it as a sign not to call her again.
Not everything has to be tied up together neatly like a fictional story. Â Sometimes the tale just ends, without a moral.
