Age Thirty
Something magical happens when you separate from someone you love and it’s someone you shouldn’t. When it’s too totally Fucked Up—Fucked Up requires capitals because of the sheer consistency of that phrase in my life—to ever work. When there’re a million and twelve reasons why it won’t. You know it when you’re together. Even when those little cracks of sunshine peek through the darkness that is un-destined love, disguising themselves as happiness for a fleeting moment, even then you know.
You make your plans to end it. You convince yourself that you’ll be okay. It’ll hurt, of course. It won’t be easy to walk away with a broken heart, but you’ll do it. You’ve broken things before and you’ve survived. You know the pain will be crippling, but you’re also sure you can do it.
Self-preservation and all that.
So you leave.
Walk, run, crawl. Whatever it is that gets you out the door so you can commence the process of repairing yourself. Or re-breaking everything he fixed because you can’t be whole without him; you only know broken, can only survive broken.
Then it happens, once you actually do it. All those reasons, those concrete barriers to true and lasting happiness that had seemed so unsurpassable before they melt away. The reasons, all one million and twelve of them, don’t seem so important anymore.
Because of the magical thing that happens when you leave someone when you don’t want to. When you leave someone because you know it’s ultimately the best thing for both of you, even though in your entire life you’ve always known that the best things for you have never been right for you.
You forget all the bad. The blood trickles down the drain, not leaving a trace of the wounds you sustained while together. Making you forget they even existed, convincing yourself that you imagined them. The only ones left are the new ones, so raw and painful that they have to be real. The ones that, in the empty air of loneliness, cut even deeper than the ones you couldn’t handle before. The ones that made you leave. The ones that you perhaps imagined.
Then it gets even more Fucked Up. You find yourself craving that exquisite pain you had before.
With him.
It had been unbearable, but it was easier to experience than the stifling empty air that yawned ahead of a life without him.
Even if I was never really with him.
“Please fasten your seat belts and set your electronics to airplane mode before stowing them safely,” a professionally pleasant voice requested over the intercom.
That was easy since I’d tossed my phone in a trash can two connections back. Right after I’d bought a one-way ticket out of the country. It wouldn’t do very well disappearing if I had a big fucking homing beacon in my pocket declaring where I was going.
Which was why my phone was buried amongst discarded sodas and soggy airport sandwiches.
Which was why I used my fake passport and stolen credit cards.
This was not my first rodeo.
My brother may have gone legit, and good for him. He could join the fucking Boy Scouts, bathe in his new, almost law-abiding life.
I excelled at breaking the law. When your brother is the president of an—until recently—outlaw motorcycle gang, you found the law didn’t pay much attention to the younger and seemingly harmless little sister. I utilized that, even though it killed me. Kurt Cobain had once said, “Thank you for my tragedy. I need it for my art.”
I couldn’t sing for shit, but I did make an art out of breaking the law and not getting caught. The boys could learn a few things from me, if they decided to go dark side again—unlikely—and listen to a female—even more unlikely.
I was a better criminal than all of them put together.
Not that any of them, including my brother and his club, otherwise known as my family, would ever know. The only thing they’d know was that the flighty and unpredictable Rosie had disappeared.
Again.
Hopefully that would be all they focused on. And hopefully no one inspected my now-abandoned house with a blue light.
They wouldn’t. They were used to this by now.
It wasn’t their first rodeo either.
Sure, Cade would go all stoic, perhaps break a couple of chairs, maybe even send someone to check my usual haunts: Las Vegas, Mexico, the Dominican Republic.
Maybe.
And he wouldn’t be overly worried when no one found me. He knew I could take care of myself. He taught me to. Well, taking care of my physical self. Emotional self was a shit show. Another Fuck-Up.
He’d sit back on his throne and wait. Plan on yelling at me when I eventually got back, toting a new guy or a new tattoo and a thousand new stories. He’d think about that for a hot minute, then focus on the wife he worshipped and the children he adored.
My finger twitched thinking about them. My beautiful niece and nephew.
My throat burned with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be seeing them for a long time, of all the things I’d miss of their lives.
“The crew are pointing out your exits, in case of emergency.”
I didn’t glance up. I’d already selected my exit in case of emergency. It was this fucking plane. If it went down, so be it.
I clenched my fists against the one armrest I had. The asshole in the middle had his meaty clams claiming both on either side, and most of my personal space as well, so his sweaty skin brushed on my bare arm when he moved. Normally, I would’ve called him out. Calling out assholes was my favorite hobby.
But I was kind of in the middle of one of my not-so-favorite hobbies.
Ruining my life.
“Cabin crew, be seated for takeoff,” the harshly accented voice of the captain replaced the soft and calm one of the attendant.
I’ve made a huge mistake. The ultimate Fuck-Up.
I was pushed back in my seat and the roar of the engine filled my ears as we ascended, lifting from American soil.
Well, it was too fucking late now. Besides, the only mistake bigger than leaving was staying.
Six Months Later
“Una cerveza, por favor.”
I paused, my mind running over the events of the day. The horror. The blood. The death.
Just another day at the office.
“And a shot of Patrón,” I added in English. I could’ve said it perfectly well in Spanish—I was near fluent at that point—but it felt nice to speak my native tongue, a way of holding onto an identity that was slipping away. That I was trying to shed at the same time I was clutching at it to store for later, like a sweater I could slip back into once I’d left this season of my life behind.
But like when you gain a few too many pounds, regardless of if you lose them again, the sweater will never fit right. Just like when you change too much from who you were before—you would never fit back into your old life.
The cold beer slid along the bar, a lemon sticking from the neck of the bottle—not because it was trendy, but because it kept the flies away from the rim. A water glass filled with clear liquid that was so not water joined it.
It was what I liked about this country. They knew how to drink.
Then again, most of the population were living in poverty and subject to political upheavals, corruption and violence—a heavy hand was medically necessary as a prescription to cure this thing called life. A bullet was another, just about as common.