Read Why We Broke Up for Free Online Page A

Ed. Shit, I guess I already loved you then. Doomed like a wineglass knowing it’ll get dropped someday, shoes that’ll be scuffed in no time, the new shirt you’ll soon enough muck up filthy. Al probably heard it in my voice when I called him, waking him because it was so late, then telling him never mind, forget it, sorry I woke you, go to bed, no I’m fine, I’m tired too, try you tomorrow, when he said he had no opinion. Already. First date, what could I do with my stupid self and the thrill of
see you Monday
? thinking there was time, plenty of time to see what pictures we’d made? But we never developed them. Undeveloped, the whole thing, tossed into a box before we really had a chance to know what we had, and that’s why we broke up.

Here it is . It took me forever to get it back to how it was, your amazing math scores all adding up in how this thing was folded. When I opened my locker Monday morning, it looked like an origami spaceship from the old Ty Limm sci-fis had landed on top of
Understanding Our Earth
, ready to unleash the electro-decimator onto Janet Bakerfield’s spinal column and destroy her brain. That’s what this did to me, too, when I unfolded the note and read it. I got all tingly and it made me stupid.
    Maybe you waited for me that first morning at school, I never asked you. Maybe you wrote it last minute after secondbell and slipped it through the slats before the Olympic dash to homeroom all the jocks always do, leaving the slowpokes spinning as you bound past their backpacks like pinball toys. You didn’t know I never go to my locker until after first. You never really learned my schedule, Ed. It is a mystery, Ed, how you never knew how to find me but always found me anyway, because our paths tug-of-warred away from each other for the whole loud and tedious stretch of school, the mornings with me hanging out with Al and usually Jordan and Lauren on the right-side benches while you shot warm-up hoops on the back courts with your backpack waiting with the others and skateboards and sweatshirts in a bored heap, not a single class in common, your Early Lunch trash-dunking your apple core like it’s part of the same game, my Late Lunch on the weird corner of the lawn, hemmed in by the preppies and the hippies bickering over the airwaves with competing sound tracks except on hot days, when they truce it with reggae. In
Ships in the Night
, Philip Murray and Wanda Saxton meet in the last scene under the rainy awning, their wrong wife and fiancé finally story-lined away, and walk out together into the downpour—we know from the first scene, Christmas Eve, that both of them like walking in the rain but don’t have anybody who will do it with them—and it’s the miracle of the ending. But there are no crisscross intersections for us, a blessing now that I live in fear of bumping into you. We’d only meet on purpose, afterschool before practice, you changing quick and shooing away your warm-upping teammates until you had to go, one more kiss, had to, one more, OK now really, I really really have to go.
    And this note was a jittery bomb, ticking beneath my normal life, in my pocket all day fiercely reread, in my purse all week until I was afraid it would get crushed or snooped, in my drawer between two dull books to escape my mother and then in the box and now thunked back to you. A note, who writes a note like that? Who were you to write one to me? It boomed inside me the whole time, an explosion over and over, the joy of what you wrote to me jumpy shrapnel in my bloodstream. I can’t have it near me anymore, I’m grenading it back to you, as soon as I unfold it and read it and cry one more time. Because me too, and fuck you. Even now.



When I look at this ripped in half, I think of the travesty of what you did and the travesty of how I didn’t care at the time. I can’t look at this while I write about it, because I’m afraid Al will see and we’ll have to talk about it all over