It didn’t matter; I wouldn’t get a chance to make that decision. When I got to the apartment all of Will’s things were gone. There was check for five thousand dollars on the counter. In the memo he wrote “for whatever.” I fell to my knees and sobbed.
Over the next few weeks, I called his phone hundreds of times with no luck. I kept replaying the words You’ve ruined me over and over in my head. I did nothing but the bare minimum in the café. I showered rarely and wore the same clothes practically every day. I had no energy, my apartment was a mess, and I didn’t even open my mail. Every day just blurred into the next and I fell deeper and deeper into a surreal fogginess of grief and sorrow. The worst part was that I knew it was entirely my fault. He was done with my fickle bullshit; how could I blame him?
He took everything that was his in the apartment, even the T-shirts I would wear; it was like he never existed. I would look for him on the street and through store windows. I went to the Montosh, where Bradley, the other bartender, told me he quit in typical Will fashion.
“Yeah, the place was packed the night he left. He stood up on the bar and said, ‘I love every single one of you.’ He was pointing and yelling ‘I love you and you and you and you’ and then he pulled out a sheet of paper from his pocket and read a prayer he wrote. I don’t remember it word for word, but I remember the last line was ‘Save your souls and stay away from love or you’ll be a madman like me’ and then he said, ‘That’s it, I’m done, I’m outta here! Gonna go sleep and drink!’ Maybe not in that order, but at least he seemed happy, in a crazed kind of way.”
The words stung, I knew Will wasn’t happy, he was never neurotic like that when he was happy, it was just his coping mechanism.
I walked out feeling like the world was folding in on me. I gasped for a breath, but the weight of my mistake was crushing. I thought Will must have been completely insane to quit his job; it wasn’t like him to be that irresponsible. I imagined him in some storage closet somewhere, drinking himself to death.
I begged Sheil to try to find him through the mutual friends they had, but she told me no, that I needed to learn my lesson. She’s a tough cookie. Martha was a little more sympathetic; she gave me a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, complete with her own highlighted notes. I sat in the back of the café, scanning the book for some answers, advice, anything I could use; I was grasping at straws. Most of what I got out of it was just a reminder that I’d f**ked everything up.
I ran my fingers over the quote Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. I squeezed my eyes shut, cursed myself, then threw the book down and screamed.
Martha came over and put her arm around me. “You need to eat—you’re disappearing on me and you’re scaring the customers.”
“I deserve it.”
“You’re wrong. Will is a deeply sensitive young man and he knows what you’ve gone through this year and he’s been patient with you. I don’t think you deserve any more heartache, but this is your own doing and you know it. You’re not being punished; you’re punishing yourself. You can’t fault a man for loving you, Mia.”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“Are you sure about that?” She sniffed me. “Child, you need a shower. Go home. I’ll close up.”
I went home and decided to skip the shower. Instead I found an old Sinead O’Connor cassette, covered the top hole with tape, stuck it in my father’s ancient stereo, got a microphone, and put it next to the piano where I composed, then recorded, the saddest piece of music I’ve ever heard. I timed the song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and recorded my wretched song right over it. I thought Sorry, Sinead, my sorrow knows no depth; my song is so much more pitiful than yours. My song is so pathetic; there is only one suitable title for it… “Hell.”
Having spent almost every day at the Kell’s for an entire year, I started declaring Sundays as my official day off. Although my hope was that I would use my free days for some form of self-improvement, either exercise or composing more pieces, I did neither one of those things. Instead I slept away nearly every moment I wasn’t at the café. I lost weight and felt exhausted all the time. There was a growing distance between Jenny and me. While she worked on starting a family, enjoying her marital bliss, I was focused on surviving a monumental heartbreak. Because Will stayed away and avoided me, I felt robbed of the opportunity to right my mistakes, which made me grow angry toward him. The memories of him were so heartbreaking, I couldn’t bear idle time in my apartment, so I would just sleep, or sit at the park and watch the children play. I envied the simplicity of childhood and let my mind wander to memories with my father in that same park. That was my only solace as the anniversary of his death passed along with my twenty-sixth birthday and Will’s thirtieth, all events that I essentially ignored. I got a few “Happy Birthdays” from people at the café. Martha made me a casserole, insisting that I eat half of it in front of her. Jenny made me a cake and Tyler did a comedic birthday slam for me on poetry night. On Will’s birthday, Jenny asked for the night off but didn’t tell me why, not that it wasn’t obvious.
When I did make an attempt to write music, the notes would inevitably turn dismal and monotonous, so I gave up playing the piano and writing music. I put all the other instruments away in closets and bought myself a nice flat-screen TV and would watch hours of meaningless, shit programing in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.