Shattered
Tonight is the worst night of my life. The absolute worst. I can’t believe I can feel this absolutely rotten.
Tomorrow (today) is supposed to be the best day of my life. I bought my very first car, an indigo blue 2002 Pontiac Sunfire. I don’t even remember how to drive, and I’m 27 years old. I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car since Halloween day, 1993, when I was 19 — the day I passed my driver’s test. I’ve relied upon Pittsburgh’s lovely public transportation system ever since. I finally, a week ago, got fed up when it took me two hours to do my two-bus commute from the ghetto where I work to my apartment high atop Mt. Washington — which is, in a car, a seven-mile commute each way. Waiting for the EBA for an hour (for the six-minute ride), and another 45 minutes for the 41E (then 15 minutes on that), was unacceptable.
My new car, which I will name after the “Sex and the City” character Samantha Jones, was the first car I sat in. And yes, I sat in it. When the dealer (a flaming gay guy who also goes to my beloved Pegasus bar) asked me to take it for a test drive, I just laughed. Told him he must not value his life. He laughed at me — he’s never had a customer who decided to buy a car who didn’t DRIVE the car off the lot that same day. Heh. It’s silly, I know, but I’ve always worked jobs with shitty wages, so shitty that I could barely afford my $40/month bus pass. But now, I’m an executive, and I need to have a car so I can actually get to work and go to off-site meetings without sheepishly asking fellow directors for a ride. It’s just plain humiliating to not have a car, at my age, in my position.
But now I have a car. Mom is going to come to my house, and we are going to take two buses out to Bloomfield, to my dealership. She rocks. She is going to drive the car off the lot for me and take me out on the road. (And she thinks she has a gray hair or two NOW. …)
While I am excited about acquiring Samantha, I am sick and sad. He left me. He left me here, naked and begging him to stay. Begging him to reconsider our clandestine entanglement — begging him to not walk away. He says it’s because we work together, because I have a higher position at work, because it just can’t happen anymore — it can’t happen at all. I hate him. I wanted to tie him up, tie him down, reason with him, tell him that you just don’t leave someone in the middle of, well, nighttime festivities.
Yet I don’t want to hurt him as much as he’s hurt me. I could never do that — I don’t ever want anyone to feel the excruciating agony that I am feeling right now.
I never dreamed I could ache so much. And given what I went through this summer, I truly believed that I’d never feel so terrible again — I can’t believe I deserved to hurt as much as I did then, and now, I have new wounds with which to contend.
I simply cannot take any more pain in my life. Cannot. Cannot. CanNOT!!!