The First Day

The first day of the rest of your life doesn't come the way you expected, with rings and champagne and lace. Instead, it comes with packing a bag and leaving in a haze, looking back at the home you've made together and wondering why every brick isn't falling out one by one.

It doesn't even matter why at this point. Reasons don't change reality and the fact that you can never go back. Oh sure, you've broken up before, but always in that childish way where you don't ever really separate because you're together as much in your fighting as you are in your laughter. This time there's a snap of cold finality to it, the separation of assets and finding a home for your beloved dog. To do this, you must really mean it. And you do.

Your resolve shocks even you.

***

Friends come out of the woodwork to comfort you and ask what happened, to offer couches and shoulders and wine, for which you are so grateful you can't even express it. Everyone talks about how much better off you are, and how it would have been so much worse with kids, and how they never really liked him that much anyway. It's all well-meant but doesn't help when you still love someone. You have to agree out loud because telling them that you still get butterflies when you think of him is just Not Done. Maybe your heart, foolish and broken but loud as ever, is just expected to catch up with your brain.

***

Eventually, you begin to figure out and really understand all the things people tell you. A friend's song about a woman who gives up her life for a man who doesn't love her resonates with you in a way that it never has before. You think you might like to see the Pacific someday, as if there was something stopping you before.

Everything reaches an equilibrium of okay until your parents come to take your dog to live with them and he cries and whines when you get out of the truck. All you want to do is bury your face in his fur and tell him that you're sorry, this isn't his fault, you should never have told him he was a bad dog for chewing up your lipstick a few weeks ago. Maybe he is just a dog and doesn't understand, but you remember how he crawled into your lap and licked your face when you cried and you know that he understands what a broken heart feels like. You hope he'll forgive you like he always does, just this one more time.

***

You drink way too much wine at a friend's party. You know it even as it's happening, but you just don't care. It dulls reality a little more and you and reality aren't exactly on the best terms this week.

The hangover the next day makes you feel like you're purging demons out of your body. Maybe you are.

***

Before you know it, you're in the new place, with two strange girls who seem very nice, but they were never part of your plan. It's a single bed, which makes you grateful for the lack of empty space next to you. As you sit in the rubble of boxes that mean your new life is about to begin, you remember learning to ride a bike. The memory, almost twenty years old, is as fresh as a lucid dream.

***

The training wheels were freshly off and your daddy still held the handlebars. You begged him not to let go because you knew you couldn't do it by yourself. It's too hard, too scary. Big girls can do it, but in your heart of hearts you don't think you are one yet.

Your daddy let go and you screamed, falling on the pavement. You knew this would happen, the scrapes and blood and failure. You whimper and sniffle and put the bike away, swearing you'll never get on it again.

Little by little, you start to resent the feeling that you're somehow less than the other girls who seem to do it with no problem. You get angry at yourself for settling for something less than everyone else seems to manage.

You silently pull the bike out of the backyard one July afternoon. You take it to the parking lot of the church, whispering a prayer to God that you don't hit your head and bleed to death from falling.

You fall. Of course you fall. But you get back up. You can do this alone. Balancing without someone holding you starts to come naturally. One foot in front of the other without even thinking of it. Suddenly you don't think about the pavement below, just the sun on your face and the clouds over your head and the wind in your hair. And you laugh, all alone doing circles in the Bethel Pentecostal Church parking lot, because you're not scared anymore.

You've got to get up, little girl. There's a whole sky waiting for you.