Calling you. Calling you back. Leaving messages. Waiting for replies to said messages, replies that never come. Doing research, in between dialing; the same facts, mainly, barring some slight referential variations.
My books list at least thirty different methods of extracting payment from people who break their promises. At the rate I’m going, I probably could do two a day. Maybe more.
The next time you don’t answer the phone, I’m going to make sure it’s because you can’t.
* * *
Day Two. Quartering lemons in the kitchen with my black-handled knife, each one coming apart with a sudden spurt, like acid-soaked yellow hearts. Skewering them with pins and leaving them to shrivel. I’m learning the lessons my mother never taught me, the secret lore of housewives—what a surprising amount of mischief you can actually do, without ever having to leave the kitchen.
Afterward, I scoured the cupboards beneath the sink for as many poisonous substances as I could find, took them out to the garage, tied a scarf around my face and mixed them up together in an empty bleach bottle. Added paste, two boxes’ worth. Ripped up my largest pile of “disposable paper products.”
It took every letter I’ve written to you since the breakup, all those returned-to-sender vows of eternal devotion, to contrive a passable papier-mache likeness. Which I then left to dry, already rotting in on itself, until tomorrow’s bonfire.
* * *
“Depression is anger turned inward.” That’s what Dr. Abbott used to tell me. Or, as my mother once put it: “Depression is when you’re already in mourning over a part of yourself you know you’re going to have to kill.”
Some 1800s-era French murderess used to call keeping a diary “writing my novel.” It’s a phrase I particularly like, because it implies being able to choose how your story will end.
This litany of curses. This literary stigmata.
I told you, more than once, how far I’d go for you, if you required it of me.
But I’ll bet you never thought I would go this far.
* * *
Day Three. I took a photo of you and me, cut it in half. Stuck your half under the dripping kitchen faucet.
Dug up the old barbecue pit, set the head in the garage on fire, and watched it burn to goo.
As of tomorrow, I’m going to start getting a little more elaborate on your ass. Throwing out some old-style hurt your way, just like the good books say—and I quote:
Make an image in his name who you would hurt or kill, of new virgin wax; under the right armpit place a swallow’s heart, and the liver under the left; hand about the neck a new needle threaded with new thread; place the hand where the foot is, and the foot where the hand is, and the head facing down; write the name of the party on its face, and on his or her ribs these words: Allif, casyl, zaze, hit, mel, meltat.
Then string it up by a thread and lightly stroke it, with a single damp finger. That slow, cool touch on your back, your side. That indefinite shiver.
Feel that sweat? Your face, moistening. In a day, it’ll be wet.
In a month, it’ll be gone.
* * *
You tell me you think you probably never loved me quite as much as I loved you. You tell me you did love me, but you don’t any more. You tell me you don’t want to hurt me. But how can I believe you?
Because if you could just wake up one day and know you didn’t love me, then everything I thought was love was actually a lie. Which means everything else could be a lie, too. Everything you say now. Anything you ever said.
And how did you really think I’d feel, after you’d made your confession?
Because however little I was loved, it was always good enough for me. Back then.
Before I knew any better.
* * *
Day Four, Five, Six. Day Seven. Day Eight.
Day Nine, and counting.