A Little Piece of Me

When you hear the phrase “break up”, you think two lovers parting ways. What you feel might be mixed: Empathy, bitterness, maybe even mockery. The mockery of love, the two teenagers who break up and get back together every three seconds, the parents who bicker and are only still together for money or for the suffering child’s sake. These are what might come to mind. What you don’t hear about breaking up is that you literally break, and the other person will always have a little piece of you with them…

Della walked down the frozen street, her chin tucked to her chest and her hands jammed in her pockets. She kept her head down as she trudged through the cold to her house, past the school. Her green eyes lingered at the entrance of the large building, by the concrete pillar second to last, on the left. There, two summers ago, they had met. Her and Tray, “The best boyfriend in the world”, as she’d used to say. Della wondered if the scratch from where she’d flung her backpack was still on the paint. It was a mark of anger from the first time she’d seen him with another girl, ten months ago. She had no clue why she’d put up with it that long.

She passed the deserted mini-mart, the humble white stucco illuminated in peach and pink from the fading winter sunlight. The three parking spaces in front stood empty. She stared at the middle one, where he’d always parked his Camaro after the football games. He used to sit on the trunk of his car with her, perched on a blanket with another one over their legs. They’d watch the stars or talk with their classmates. That one night he’d forgotten to meet her after she put away her band clothes, the one night the space was taken up by someone else’s car, was the night she’d decided to leave him. That was the first decision she didn’t keep.

Della tucked her head down again, trying to keep warm and trying not to be seen. It was ridiculous to not want to be seen when there was nobody around, but she kept her head down anyway. She couldn’t help put pause and glance up when she passed Rae’s house. That was where the party had been, and Tray had always been at the center of it. She mentally walked in, remembered how it felt to step on the hall carpet, her long auburn hair bouncing at her back. She remembered Tray’s slightly slurred voice, how charming she thought he sounded, how innocent and honest she thought he was when he was drunk. She could almost feel the pressure of his fingers on her wrist as he guided her into the back bedroom, how easily she had given in. As she rounded the house she saw the very window she had been pressed up against for a short time. The curtain was drawn and she could see the bed, where she had been for a long time. Della blushed and walked on through the frost on the sidewalk. Soon Robbie’s house cropped up in her view.

Rea might have thrown the parties, but everyone crashed at Robbie’s. That’s where the harder partying had been, the bash in the back room for those who weren’t yet ready to go home. The garage, in the summer, was a collage of clothes and paraphernalia for not only sex and drugs, but rock-and-roll as well. The couches were notorious for all three. She remembered with regret how much time she had spent on a couch with Tray at Robbie’s. She remembered waking up in the morning and looking for her clothes amidst a sea of similar wear. She remembered how there were usually noises just like theirs coming from only a few feet away. She remembered later how much time she had spent on a couch without Tray, sitting and waiting for him to come out, take what he wanted, and leave again. Once he started going into the back room and not coming out until morning, she decided she was going to leave him. That was the second decision she didn’t keep.

Robbie himself came to the door, presumably to watch the small-town sunset. He waved apologetically at her. Della nodded quickly and kept walking, keeping her chin down tight to the silver breast-button of her olive-green coat. She knew Robbie couldn’t go past his front door. The little court-ordered bracelet on his ankle said so. She walked out past the hills of dirt where the new apartment complex would go. The area was expanding fast, and she knew that the people in her town would adapt quickly to change. They always did.

She rounded the corner, past the country club, and up the small, well-kept avenue that wound its way past the golf course. She remembered how she used to work there, a counter girl at the pro shop. How Tray would show up in those later days, after he quit going to Robbie’s and Rea’s. He would go into the dressing rooms, put on an outrageous outfit, and talk to the other men as though nothing was wrong with wearing an orange polo with a pink scarf, blue pants, green golf shoes and a purple poplin driving cap, with a tee in the corner of his mouth and a dashing pair of white gloves on his hands. Oh, he used to make Della laugh.

She walked past the pro shop, and then lingered to look at the space behind it. She winced. The moon had been bright that night. He’d been to Robbie’s again, he’d gone into the back room where the boys had discovered a dangerous new substance, a real thrill that was heated in spoons and injected into the arm. His eyes had been strange, and when he’d held her arms down in the back seat of his car and moved her uniform skirt out of the way, she knew she would have to leave him.

She’d never gotten the chance.

She opened the final gate, a black wrought-iron one that gave the faintest of squeaks. Her shoes made only the smallest noise, muffled by grass as she strode across the cemetery ground to the small, unassuming headstone she visited every Sunday. She kneeled, her jeans creaking enough that she wondered, quickly, if she were gaining weight. She couldn’t have that, now that she was single again… She looked down at the headstone. “Tray Gleason, taken too soon,” she read. “More like, ‘Tray Gleason, taken by drugs.’ Or rather, took too many” Her voice was thin and bitter. She didn’t know who she spoke to, certainly not Tray, maybe not herself, probably God. She looked at the headstone and remembered Tray’s sobbing mother Jackie, how they’d each clasped one of his hands while he was in the hospital bed, overdosing as they watched. She remembered the funeral at this very place, how disgusting the gritty handful of dirt had felt as she threw it onto his coffin, how all her friends told her she should have felt like dancing on his grave. His heroin-soaked, tear-besotted grave.

Della threw herself over the headstone and sobbed, putting on her weekly show for her one-person audience, herself. She knew the bastard had taken so many pieces of her already, and here she was giving him another one. Instead of the words that were coming out of her mouth, “Tray, oh god, I miss you”, she was thinking “Tray, you bastard, I hate you.” Her hair spilled over her late lover’s white headstone like an amber waterfall and she ground her fist into the dirt under which he lay, crying and shaking with a despair she suddenly understood.

He had taken so many little pieces of her with him, she was practically over her own grave.

AN:

Originally, when I wrote this story, I imagined myself as Della; broken, weeping, regretful of not letting go of something soon enough. Suddenly, I see myself not as a statue with missing chips, but as a patchwork quilt. Where others have taken away, I have taken from them and stitched into the correct places. I may be mismatched and crude, but I am whole. I just thought that was poetic enough to add. 3

-MC