It's really amazing I made it through undergrad, what with the late nights, late parties, late make-out sessions, late visits, late dinners, late late late. Then the relationship began and it never seemed to unravel out of its fantastically inebriated sweater. It just kept hurling, spurtling towards some sort of explosive end in which I was so panicked to let it go, when there was really nothing left to hang on to. I was trying to hang onto a chasm of two years that resulted in drunken misery and yet oh so much fun. Or so I thought. Was it fun? It makes for entertaining, wild stories. I will never be one of those Good-Girl-Justines in which I "go to the grave with life not lived in my veins."
I remember knowing full well that it was over. I went to bed, resigned myself to the inevitable, let a few tears out onto the pillow and felt dizzyingly sick. I didn't know or remember what life was like without a relationship - who would be my friends, what would I do on the weekends, who would I talk to every day. And when it came to its overemotional finale, something inside me snapped and let loose a rush of uninhabitable demons - things I couldn't overcome, hurt I couldn't resolve. I distinctly remember going to Burt's Tiki Lounge the night after the breakup and drinking a $40 tab - not an easy feat in New Mexico, especially not so for one skinny girl. And yet I found irrevocable solace in friends that repeatedly said to me, "I never liked that guy."
But it wasn't a real resolution, and it took me over a year to figure out that I was not a victim, that I was as much a part of all the shit. That things grew out of fairy-tale and legend, that I looked good with eyeshadow smeared across my hungover pillow, crying with girlfriends, tormenting boyfriends, spiraling downward into an abyss of drunkards and Michael Jackson.
Then I woke up.