City Lights

R___ lived up on the east side with her sister. Their house was a rathole, ghetto as hell, but had a remarkable view. At night you could see the entire city stretch for what seemed hundreds of miles. A little backround: R___ and I dated for over two years. At one point we were even engaged. Shit was pretty deep. Because of a fuck up on my part we broke up on New Years eve, 2003. We did our own thing for six months. She dated a few guys and partied a lot. I partied too. I had also met someone really fucking incredible during our time apart. I’ll call her J___. Of course I didn’t realize how good I had it until, like an idiot, I left J___ to re-pursue my Ex. (or should I say J___, tired of my bullshit, left me) Why? I thought I was still in love. I had walked away from my life and my future wife without offering even the slightest fight. How wrong I was.

R___ and I got back together for a month that July to give it one last try; talk about a miserable time. She was hopelessly addicted to cocaine, searching for a savior. She was a fucking mess...a wreak, so was I. I wanted to know if I still had feelings for R___. I wanted to know if I was still in fact, in love. In love with R____ as a person, and not just in love with love, or in love with the perfect memory of how things used to be when times were good. However, things had changed. It wasn’t like in the past where I’d patiently endure her tantrums and piece of shit friends and silently tolerate her various addictions be it painkillers, alcohol, or weed completely blinded by love or the incessant need to “make things right.” The second time around I didn’t really give a flying fuck what she did. In fact, I was subconsciously doing whatever I could to insure she’d get rid of me. R___ loved my newfound indifference. It turned her on. It also made her even clingier. She needed me more than she ever did then when I was a “nice” guy. I think the reason I stayed with her as long as I did that July was because I was afraid she would kill herself had I of left.

Scene: A typical summer night, circa July, 2003.

“Do you know why the lights twinkle the way they do?”

“Is it the smog?” R___ curiously asks in her cute Russian accent.

“No, it’s not the smog.”

We sit in silence staring at the cityscape; I’m nursing a beer, a latte, and lighting another fag (I had become an unrepentant chain smoker). I scan the horizon with it’s millions of dots trying to determine where J____, the “other” girl I had dated while R___ and I were apart, could be. I played this game quite often: sitting on R___’s porch staring at the city…looking for J___; it was a self-destructive “Where’s Waldo” I loved to play. I had narrowed my search down to two locations. The general vicinity where J___’s apartment was where she lived with her dog OR on the corner of 4th and 2nd, where the club her and her friends liked to frequent stood. I try not to think about her being out there with someone else, someone new. How hypocritical considering here I am, half dressed, with my ex, who was a major source of contention between J____ and I and ultimately the cause of our breakup and the...

“So why do the lights twinkle?!” She persists, interrupting my train of thought.

“Tuzik, what causes the lights to twinkle is people throughout the entire city either turning their lights on or turning their lights off,” I quietly explain.

She solemnly nods in agreement, my words not entirely registering, or perhaps they do but she has already withdrawn from the conversation thinking about her next line, subconsciously getting up to go back inside while blowing her nose to clear the path for the beloved white powder, her Queen Mab. Our coke binges are the only activity we share anymore, that and some lackluster, uninspired sex. She begs me to come in and do some lines with her. Like a fool I agree.

A week later, I left R___ for the very last time.