No Smile For William in The Stuff That's Not Interesting But Is The Most Interesting Stuff I'll Write

I’ve spent the last week grappling with everything that happened. I felt like I stabbed myself in the chest for nearly 4 days. It was like a had a constant, heavy pain pressing on my body. After a while it faded away to a kind of numbness like novocaine. I got rid of Facebook for the time being because just a day after I left, Richard was posting photos of himself and some guy he met at the Christian Louboutin sample sale in LA a few months back. It felt like I would start seeing blood leaching out through my clothes around the place where my heart was supposed to be.

I just kept thinking about Sense & Sensibility. There is a point where Elinor’s secret knowledge of the dissolution of her assumed-relationship is revealed to her sister, Marianne, and when cross-examined, she finally bursts all of her emotion into one sentence.

That’s exactly how I felt.

Tuesday night, I made the mistake of telling my friend Howard what happened. He kept pressing me, trying to get me to talk about it, and, although I know his intentions were meant kindly, I got incredibly irritated about it. Part of me knows that one of my greatest problems is that I pretend I’m fine all the time to avoid having conversations about what I really think and feel, but at the same time, there are moments when I really don’t feel like talking. So I started smiling and nodding the rest of the week.

It wasn’t until the other night that I ran into Will, this really cute railroad worker whom I initially had a crush on, but he’s become an acquaintance that I always enjoy seeing. For whatever reason, probably because I hadn’t seen him in months, when he asked how I was doing, I actually told him.

I told him the whole story. I didn’t leave anything out. In fact, I think I told him more than I wrote on here. When I was finished, he said the most amazing thing. It was incredibly simple, but it was like being blasted with cold water.

He said, “Well, I’m glad you didn’t harm yourself or end your life. You can’t do that because then you would be depriving some man out of his match. You can’t let that man who dreams of you down by not showing up when your time comes.”

It was the most ridiculous, Julia Roberts-ish thing I’ve ever heard, but it instantly took all of my pain away. This whole last week, people have been relentlessly trying to cheer me up, and it’s been fucking annoying the shit out of me, but here comes this guy, gruff and kind of uncomfortable with me who happens to pinpoint exactly what I needed to hear.

Thank you, William.