Broken Hearts Damaged Goods

by Gunthridge, Jack

  I had thought about asking him why he kissed me, but I enjoyed it too much to want to ruin the moment. Maybe I didn’t really care what his motives were. Even if I could get hurt later on, I still wanted this moment to be perfect with him.

  Anyway, we spent a good portion of the night making out. We also had a fairly deep conversation while we were doing this, but I don’t really remember what it was about. I was just a little bit too relaxed with all of the physical stuff going on to pay attention to what Jack was actually asking me. I know that I answered him truthfully, which I probably shouldn’t have done.

  I think I wasn’t used to a guy being able to kiss me and listen to me at the same time. Of course, I don’t usually have a guy that listens to me.

  And it was nice to make out with a guy without his hands being all over me. He played with my hair and caressed my arms, back, and side. He never once grabbed my ass or tried to cop a feel. He didn’t even dry hump me.

  And for all of the great things that I can say about him and how much I enjoyed last night, I don’t know where I stand with him. I’m with a guy while not being in a relationship with him as we try to get over our last relationships.

  The only thing is that I am over Steve. He was easy to get over. But Jack is... He doesn’t ever tell you what he is thinking. He’s great at listening, but he doesn’t talk about himself and what he is feeling.

  Some nights he goes into the living room to work on his writing, or he will just sit there thinking. I know that he is a creative writing major, but you would think an artist would be able to express himself better in person.

  I remember falling asleep last night with his arms around me. Okay, we were spooning, but he was holding my hand. Actually his hand kind of spooned my hand with his fingers intertwined in mine. We drifted off in conversation.

  Then when I woke up at four in the morning, I noticed that he was gone. I found him in the living room. He was just sitting in the dark. I tried talking to him, but he said that nothing was wrong.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I just put my arm around him and put my head on his shoulder. I figured that I would let him know that I was there for him, when he was ready to talk.

  I don’t remember much else after that. I woke up this morning in my bed. Jack woke me up when he entered with the breakfast that he made me. He seemed in an unusually good mood. He was like a guy that was in love, which made the entire world okay. He even greeted me with a kiss as he put the tray across my legs.

  “Are you doing okay”, was the first thing that came to my mind. It might have been a little insensitive for a guy that had just made me breakfast, but I was confused by his behavior.

  Again he said that everything was fine. And I let it drop because I wanted to believe that if he was torn between two women, I was winning at the moment. The more time I spend with him, I should be able to get him to love only me.

  I know I promised him that we would be each other’s cocoon where we would heal each other so that we could turn into these beautiful butterflies that will just fly off to find some perfect love. But I’ve been thinking that I don’t want to heal him to have him leave to love somebody else.

  I’ve decided that I’m going to perform an exorcism on him. I’m going to drive that fucking bitch that broke his heart from his mind and heal his heart. Once I drive the darkness out, I will replace it with the light of my love.

  A Kiss is Just a Kiss

  By

  Jack Webber

  I got my first girlfriend when I was in kindergarten. It was a magical time where a boy and a girl could play the perfect couple. We were young enough and stupid enough to think that love could just be sustained by enjoying each other’s company.

  In that idyllic state, I received my first kiss. Like my relationship, it was simple and sweet. We weren’t going for complex. We were just playing the common male and female roles that we had seen on TV and in movies.

  It seems that such a relationship is not sustainable. Boys and girls can’t play the sex roles that they’ve grown up with. They haven’t lived enough to know that humans are more messed up than our parents and Hollywood would allow us to believe.

  It is in this awkward stage between grade school and junior high that boys and girls first learn that they are better off without the opposite sex. Bros before hoes. Sisters before misters.

  And then comes junior high when the girls start to become more attractive. You don’t know why, but you want to try to impress them. You start changing your behavior to get their attention. You could blame it on some sort of weakness on your part, but the fact of the matter is that women spend a large amount of time at this age to make men weak. It is actually rather cruel. Men would complain, but there is a certain bliss in the free fall.

  It is during this stage that I received my first true kiss. It was at an eighth grade dance. We were doing a little slow dance. I really liked this girl, and not because she was fun to hang out with or because I thought she was cute. We were no longer playing roles. We were getting to know each other.

  More than an exploration into foreign territory, the kiss was an expression of something deeper. Even if the relationship didn’t last, the feeling and sensation caused by that first kiss keeps us wanting more and looking for more as we go through life.

  As we search for more of what we found in that first kiss, we sometimes feel something for the other person. Other times we are just exploring our options with what is available to us at that moment. Our emotional involvement waxes and wanes as we enjoy the physical. There are just the two camps of kissing. We can do it for the simple pleasure or as an expression of something different.

  And that is what I thought until last night when I made out with a girl that I am not dating and have no intention of dating. In fact, we have both agreed that we are just using each other to get over our recent breakups.

  I know that this may sound cruel and uncaring, but kissing her last night was almost an epiphany. It wasn’t an empty, purely physical experience. And yet, it also wasn’t an expression of anything that I might be feeling for her. It was...

  It was a healing experience where I was kissing her soul. Of all of the women I have kissed, I have never kissed a woman’s soul before. This includes my longest relationships where I thought that this was the person I was going to marry.

  I might have to seriously reconsider the wisdom of my mother whenever I would fall down as a child. I outgrew that stage of my life where I could fall down and have somebody kiss it and make it better. But as I am going through this breakup, I might very much need somebody to heal the wounds that I can’t see or even express.

  Liselle

  (You’ll Never Know)

  By

  Jack Webber

  Everybody has a personae that they like to project to the world. Sometimes this is intentional due to the fact that a great many of us would think that others would never like us if we tried to be who we really are. And then there are people like Liselle, who are so much more than they seem to be. It’s not that they are trying to be somebody else. They are just so easily pigeonholed and classified by people that their true personality never seems to escape that label.

  When I first met Liselle, I thought she was like most of Steve’s other girlfriends. She was attractive, but she didn’t seem to have much else to her. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t think she wasn’t a nice person. Steve and I have never really had the same taste in women, until recently. He has always preferred the eye candy, while I have always gone for substance over style.

  That is what has made getting to know Liselle such a surprise. There is a lot more to her than I would have suspected. And it makes me sad to think that men like Steve have dated her for extended periods of time and never realized how truly beautiful she is. Worse still is that, with no man ever telling her this, she has no idea herself.

  I tried to tell her myself, but I think it came out wrong. She started crying. And in logic that no man ever real
ly understands, she said that she wasn’t crying because I said that she was beautiful; she was crying because I told her she was beautiful when she was planning on making out with me.

  You see, logic like this confuses men, who by their very nature look at the world through cause and effect. In man’s natural viewpoint, when you tell a girl that she is beautiful and she starts crying, it means that there is a correlation between the two. The cause: You told her that she was beautiful. The effect: She started crying. If you hadn’t told her that she was beautiful, she wouldn’t have started crying.

  And as a man, I can tell you that men never like to make women cry, unless they are purposefully trying to hurt them, but those are usually abusive and controlling men. But generally, when you are trying to do something nice like telling a girl that she’s beautiful, you want it to be nice. You want her to accept it in the spirit in which it is given. When she starts to cry, the man thinks that he has done something wrong. He then tries to make the woman stop crying, so he does even nicer things than telling her she’s beautiful, which only causes her to cry more. All of this further confuses the boy.

  What women do not understand is that men see tears and crying as a bad thing. You cry when you are upset, when somebody close to you dies, or if you are extremely moved by something like a book or a movie. But crying at other times than these is frowned upon by men. There’s no reason for it. There has to be a certain, identifiable cause for the crying.

  So, although I had wanted her to accept my compliment as something that would bring her joy and know that I found something about her as a person beautiful, her crying and reasoning behind the crying really speaks volumes more to what I ultimately found beautiful about her.

  When I found out my best old ex-friend Steve was messing around with my girlfriend, who would have been my fiancé had she said, “Yes” when I proposed to her, instead of, “I’m sorry to hurt you, but I’ve kind of been seeing your best friend behind your back. And I prefer him to you.” Anyway, this found me drunk and lonely, which was kind of how Liselle was, too. For some reason, when a man and a woman are both drunk and lonely, it is usually cause enough for the two of them to fool around.

  I am not sure what the woman’s reasoning behind going along with this is. The man’s reasoning and logic in these cases is usually pretty sound. It very rarely has anything to do with the alcohol or being lonely. It usually has more to do with the cold, hard facts of one being a man while the other is a woman. It seems only natural that when a single man finds a woman, who is also single, that he should in some way see if he can couple off with her. How long the coupling off will last really depends on a number of factors, but the man will worry about that later. At this stage, he is just interested in being with a girl. If it doesn’t work out, he can always use the “drunk and lonely” excuse. It’s basically the dating world’s equivalent of the insanity plea.

  So Liselle and I found ourselves drunk, lonely, of sound state of mind, and back at her place. We were curing our current problems with an act of revenge and by helping somebody else out that was in a similar situation. Now, I know this doesn’t sound very beautiful. In fact, I would even admit that it sounds a little down and dirty, but I... It’s not that I couldn’t perform, or didn’t find Liselle attractive, I was still in love with somebody else and didn’t want to do anything stupid that would screw up my chances of being able to fix a broken relationship.

  Liselle understood this and was there for me that first night when my whole world had come crashing down on me. She was a greater friend as somebody I only knew through somebody else than some of my actual friends. She was also a much greater comfort than any bottle of alcohol.

  I’m not going to say that I was suicidal that night, or the next couple of days after that, but I found certain bright spots in being with Liselle in the days immediately after the breakup. This is one of the reasons that I told her she was beautiful. But it wasn’t just that she was a comfort to me. In a way, she defied my expectations and proved herself to be more beautiful.

  Knowing the type of girl Steve usually dates, I would not have been surprised if they would have slept with me to get back at him for cheating on them. It would have been the revenge game. But Liselle...

  As I have gotten to know her, I have discovered that she felt something for Steve, which kind of surprises me. Most of the girls that he dates are in the relationship because he is reasonably attractive and fun to be around. She saw things in him that I saw in him as my best friend. That’s not saying that I don’t find the guy to be total dick at this moment in time. But it is somehow validating for me to know that I wasn’t crazy in thinking this son of a bitch was my best friend from the time that I was six. It’s always nice to know that the majority of my existence wasn’t spent having fun with a girlfriend stealing man-whore that puts getting some ahead of his closest personal relationships.

  Even though she cared for him, she doesn’t seem to be as hurt as I am by being cheated on and dumped. I admit that my last relationship lasted longer than hers and Steve’s, but she seems to be quite alright with not being with him. I tried to understand this because I want to know if I am lingering on the past. There is also a part of me that wanted to know what their relationship was like and why it failed. I wanted to try to understand her thinking and feelings.

  I didn’t expect it to turn into one of the deepest conversations I have ever had with a woman. She told me about the problems that she had been having with Steve since school started and how she had tried to save the relationship. She told me about how she had raped him one night when he was really drunk and had wished that she could have had a relationship with him like I had with Brittany. And then she went into her past boyfriends and other sexual exploits.

  I know that this may not sound exactly beautiful, but you didn’t hear her talk about it. She never tried to justify any of her previous behavior, or say that she has changed. I think she regrets some of her exes, but she doesn’t offer any apologies. She seems to have been looking for love and willing to give more of herself than she should have. It was like she was playing the lottery with these men. She was willing to unapologetically go all in for a chance of something that could have paid off. If it didn’t work, at least she gave it her best shot.

  As somebody who maybe guards his heart a little bit too much, I have to admire somebody who has the courage and nerve to love as if there is no tomorrow. She knows that by exposing everything that she has to the person she cares for that she opening herself up to heartache, but she is willing to take that chance. I think there is something beautiful about that.

  And when I think about it, it is even more beautiful because she has never closed up her heart after having been hurt. She doesn’t judge all men based on what one has done. She still thinks that there could be a perfect guy for her out there that will give her everything she has been looking for.

  And I don’t know why, but with her crying and everything that she was saying, I couldn’t help but to kiss her soul. I wanted to make her understand that she was beautiful and that I truly thought she was beautiful.

  I don’t know when I will be cured from my broken heart. Hopefully I will be able to love again and be able to love the way that Liselle does. Until that time, I expect to have her reveal more of her true beauty and to help me to be whole again. And maybe by the time she helps me to accomplish this; I can actually make her understand just how beautiful she is. Otherwise, she’ll never know.

  Sept. 18, 2010

  Jack and I went to a party tonight. I don’t think he really wanted to go, but I thought that it would be good for him. We have basically been isolated from a mutual group of friends. As much as I like spending time with him, I think he needs to go out and see some of his guy friends.

  Although I knew that Steve and Brittany would be at this party, I still thought that we should go. His friends wanted him to go. I think that was partly to know that he was okay. There were also rumors that Jack and I had b
een sleeping together ever since the breakup. I think they were curious whether this was out of revenge, or if we were just screwing each other because of the fun of it.

  Since the breakup, Steve and Brittany have officially become a couple. They were Facebook official and everything. It didn’t even take them 24 hours to go from being in a relationship with us to being single to being in a relationship with another person. I think they thought it made it look better if they were a couple versus just being two people who were cheating on their exes with each other.

  Our friends had already accepted Steve and Brittany as an actual couple, even though they knew the circumstances behind their getting together. Jack and I, on the other hand, were a curiosity. Maybe we didn’t want to be legitimate. There is a certain amount of wanting to enjoy that feeling of being newly single where you can do whatever you want with whomever you want whenever and however you want. Jack and I sort of went to the party with this attitude.

  We also went with the understanding that we would flaunt ourselves at this party. We wanted to show that we were doing okay. I knew that this was going to be easier for me since I was already over Steve. I wasn’t too thrilled about seeing him with Brittany, but I was over him. Jack would have to be the one who did the majority of the real acting. I went to the party knowing that I would have to be his support system. This may not be the best way to go to a party, but it is what he needed.

  The party started okay. We made our scandalous entrance. Jack kept his arm around my waist. We made all sort of private comments to each other. Once we proved our legitimate couplehood, we casually went our separate ways. I ended up talking to Megan, while Jack was talking to Dave and Chris.

  Megan gave me crap the moment that I was alone with her. She applauded me on my performance with Jack. She wondered whether we could keep it up when Steve and Brittany showed up.