Moving Day 1

There is nothing left for me here.  I typed the words and stared at them.  They could have just as easily been the opening statement of a suicide note.  Maybe they would have been, if I was a slightly different me.  Truth was, at that moment I already felt dead enough.  My girlfriend--I was all set to promote her to fiancee', but it turned out she had other plans.  Intentionally or accidentally, perhaps some vague subliminal merging of the two, it doesn't really matter; either way I ended up with a text message that showed her doing things she had always claimed were too kinky with a man she always said was too arrogant for respect.  My boss.  Somewhere between eight and ten drinks later I walked in the rain to the restaurant where I worked and challenged him to a fight in the middle of dinner service.  The theme from "Rocky" was blaring in my head, and I had spent most of my walk envisioning some sort of triumphant revenge.  Hell, even if I'd won I would have probably regretted it.  It's hypothetical, though, because I didn't win.  I got my ass handed to me.  I'm not typically the sort of person to give in to emotion in that way, and if I'd approached my betrayal from my standard rational perspective, one glaring fact would have stood out.  I'm a terrible fighter.  In the fourth grade I got my lunch money stolen by second graders, and in the fifteen years since not a whole lot had changed.  I should have gotten my revenge by icing his front step in the winter, or pissing in his convertible.  Not through physical aggression.  I was already soundly beaten when a waiter ran up and held my hands behind my back.  He told the cops he was just trying to break things up, and none of the witnesses contradicted him, although typically when you are trying to break up a fight you grab the person standing and not the one who has fallen to his knees.  It was while in the midst of being grappled that my boss kicked me in the face with a steel-toed boot.  My jaw would be wired shut for most of the next month.

So what was the total damage of my one bad night?  Newly single, after putting a two-hundred dollar down payment on a ring.  Unemployed and very ineligible for unemployment benefits.  Charged with public intoxication and assault.  Nearly six grand in medical bills.  These are the big things that happened, of course.  There was still the fallout to deal with.  Reno may be the biggest little city, but it seems more little than big when you aren't a tourist, and especially in the digital age word of my humiliation traveled quickly.  Sharon and I had been dating four years, enough time that just about all of our friends were mutual. A few diplomatic souls still invited both of us to parties, or neither, but mostly they called her.  She was the pretty one, the funny one, the one that lit up a room.  I was the one who could tell you that the guy from "Scrubs" got his start in a Woody Allen movie, that "Psycho" was the first film to show a flushing toilet, and that Bruce Springsteen wrote "Blinded by the Light."  So my social life ended.  My professional one as well.  The incident at the steakhouse had pretty much turned my resume to shit.  I sat at home and watched cable until the cable was cut.  One mistake. One bad day.  Now all of my belongings--well, all of those that would fit--were piled into a rental car.  I'd seen on the news a week before that one of my high school classmates was going to represent the country in the winter Olympics.  I was headed back to Boise to live with my parents.  I looked back down at my phone, my hand shaky as I finished the message.  I guess I have you to thank for that.  Go fuck yourself.  It was immature and I knew it, but it didn't matter.  My thumb hovered over the send button.  If had really typed out the text because I felt the need to hurl an insult, that would have been one thing, but as I fought back tears in the parking lot outside of what had been our apartment together I knew--and knew that she would know--they were just camouflage.  What I was trying to say was I'm leaving, ask me to stay, or wish me well, or just FUCKING think about me at all, ok, bye, and I didn't want to say those things.  I hit the end key and put my phone in my pocket.  Going home to live with the folks.  Yeah, great.  It's not one of those things that's very good for the ego, but at least it was forward momentum, and that's more than I could have said about the last couple of months.  I got into the car and headed north.