The Fork in the Road

“Sometimes life has to push us along when we don’t” she says to me. I call my  friend the Fortune Cookie. It’s in the way she speaks that gave her this title. She never really says anything but somehow manages to clear out the smoke that blurs my vision when I seek her advice. My “fortune cookie” inspires me with her wisdom.

They say when one door closes, another opens. And here I am in the hallway, waiting for another one to open. My door was shut. Actually, it slammed so hard it rattled the hinges of my soul and echoed long into the next day. It was a day of many "Losses". Fuck, they don’t call it Friday the 13th for nothing. And the combination of all those things lost, all in one day, was a combination that was enough to put anyone over the edge.

Loss number one was my job. It’s just a building. Just a building where I had so many life events. It marked the beginning of my life in Arizona, the birth of my child, the ending of a serious relationship and a beginning of an un-definable one with someone else. I took that building and its access for granted for so long. And all that drama, excitement, and memories, all packed away with two cardboard boxes and a goodbye. Loss number one.

Loss number two. I had lost my car keys. It’s like they got reabsorbed into the pits of hell. And it wasn’t so much that I lost the keys, it was what was attached to them.  A key chain with my name on it, the only thing he ever gave me. The only object he ever gave me. The keys were there on my desk, and then all of a sudden they were gone. Just like that. Maybe they stayed in that building as a symbol of how everything that had to do with him had to stay there. Reabsorbed, into a time a capsule, a chapter of my life that finally came to a close. Life, pushing me along.

A couple of shots of Tequila later, the day had come to a peak when I realized loss number three. The loss of passion. Something that was already dwindling between us, but something I only realized was really gone that night when we were in the hotel room together. And I cried tears of heartbreak. I no loger felt his hunger for me when he touched me. His lips no loger passed on little sparks of electricity when they touched mine. I no loger felt like his touch brought me to life. I remember closing my eyes and anticipating that feeling that I was so used to feeling. It felt something like how a thirsty flower feels when it is watered whenever he touched me. But the feeling was abscent that night. I remember aching for the feeling but not being able to find it.

It hurt twice as much as anything I had ever experienced before. It hurt because this was the second time that this had happened to me. The first time passion was lost, I never really took the time to deal with it. Simply because someone else replaced the passion that was gone, I never dealt with it the first time I lost it. And here I was, loosing it one more time and, better yet, to the person who replaced it in the first place. My firework had fizzled out.

I wondered if I could blame all the events of what happened that night in the hotel room on the tequila, or on the combination of events on one very bad day. But I know that every emotion I felt towards him that night was real, maybe heightened, but real.

“Is this why you made yourself cry?’ he asked “because you told me if I ever made you cry you would not come back”

And all I could think, but not say, was that I didn’t make myself cry.  I couldn’t make my mouth utter the painful words of what was true. I couldn’t tell him that I’ve been holding back my tears and my real feelings for a long time, and that day I just couldn’t hold it back anymore.

It felt good to let it go. To let it go and admit that I had the right to feel that way. And he was glad too, I could tell. Because he was waiting for my breaking point too. The point in which I would say “no more”. I pray to God for the strength to make it be true.

This building is where WE started. Isn’t it appropriate that there it would end? No more building, no more key chain, no more passion.

And I could add one more fear onto my list of reasons I don’t want to do the relationship thing. Fear of commitment, fear of the unknown, fear of having another man loose passion for me. One and one makes two, but I don’t think I could yet again handle the pain of loosing another man’s passion for me, for the third time.

I don’t think I can handle another man telling me for the third time in a row that he has lost the ability to see me as an attractive woman. And its not that I’m not, it’s just that they forget how to see me that way. The same reason, yet again.

But just like a job and the key chain, and even the passion, it’s all replaceable. But it will never be the same with the new version of it. The new key chain will not have the same meaning, the halls of the new job will not hold all the memories of the one before it, and the passion we felt together will always be the fork in the road of that which is my life.

I hope he can appreciate what that means to me. That he was my fork. Maybe one day he will admit that even though I wasn’t the fork in his life, but I was standing there when he came to it.