No Thanks

It is thanks to that rapidly fading relationship marker, the mix tape; he placed this song in slot one, side A, with a note reading: “You get me through the day. Thank you.”

Three o’clock in the morning, and movie-raining in the dark. I am driving jagged, aimless circles, tearing obscenities from my gut, slamming the creased part of my palm into the steering wheel. I have just been dumped.

An email… he did it in an email…”I propose,” he’d written, “that we go back to being friends.”

Ah… well… at least I couldn’t say I hadn’t gotten a proposal.

Occasionally I would meet another car; the drivers saw me signal and downshift and break, all very normal, all very okay; they’d splish past me in the rain, these other drivers, heading home or back to the bar or off to work, none of them with any idea that the occupant of the ’95 Corolla had just been dumped.

I would dearly love to tell you that I did something desperate and dramatic that night and driven through the sunrise, but the lame nonfiction fact is that I had to work at 8AM. And that is how I wound up in the parking lot of a Hobby Lobby, staring at the PRE-CHRISTMAS STITCHERY SALE sign and wondering if anyone would ever be in love with me again, as this song came on the radio.

I’m married, the man behind the memory is married, and… there is a little dent on the dashboard of my car from the rapid punch it gets whenever I hear so much as a snippet of “Thank You.”