Humiliated and unwilling to subject myself to any more stares, I wheeled back to the lobby of the airport, my eyes on the floor. Some miles later, with my flight safely in the air without me, sweat poured from my forehead as I scrambled to keep up with my rambling brain. Uncomfortably bundled in my winter coat, I wandered aimlessly through the airport, rolling the burden of my lightweight suitcase, which felt like a case of bricks, with no destination.
It was always the music that hurt me most. It did the most damage. For every single day of my life, I had a song to coincide with it. Some days were repeats. Some days I woke up to the lyrics circling in my head. The lyrics sometimes set the tone for my day, and as a slave, I followed. But some songs were like a sharp fingernail poking into open-wounded thoughts. Because music is the heart’s greatest librarian. A few notes had the ability to transport me back in time, and to the most painful of places. Take any song from the Rolodex of your life, and you can pin it to a memory. It translates, resonates, and there it will remain. And no matter how many of those Rolodex cards you want to rip out and burn like an old phone number to make room for new ones, those songs remain and threaten to repeat.
And the song that circled through the deep recesses of my brain—while I tried my best to rip it from the Rolodex—bruised me well thanks to my good friend coincidence, and was cruelly pulling up every memory associated with it. It filtered like a burn through my nose and out of my lungs while I stomped along the white tiled floor of the airport in my heavily abused Chucks and stared at the Sharpie-stained lyrics I’d scribbled all over them.
The song that played was a tattoo over my heart, like several others. And for the second time in my life, I wanted the music to stop. I needed the repeat to cease. I didn’t want to feel that burn. It was too absolute.
And that logic was ridiculous.
There were a few things I knew as I worked up a sweat, staring at the small cracks and stains on the surface of the floor beneath me.
The first was: I was not getting on a plane that day.
The second was: I was not going to call Lexi back and ask her a single question.
And the third: I refused to acknowledge. The hurt was far too present.
What was it about a woman’s psyche that refuses to let us ignore the old aches, the ancient pains, and the memories of the men we bind ourselves to?
I used to think men were experts at forgetting about the past and moving on, but I was finally old enough to know better. Their memories were just as vivid, just as painful. They were just better at letting go.
Exhausted, I stopped in the middle of my walk, and a man slammed into me.
“Sorry!” I quickly apologized as he gripped my arm to steady us both. He was prematurely balding, had soft green eyes, and was dressed from head to foot in Army camouflage, his pants tucked into boots. A soldier.
“It’s fine,” he said quietly as he readjusted the bag on his shoulder and gave me a quick wink before taking off toward a group of others dressed like him. I moved away from the steady flow of human traffic, my back against the wall as seconds ticked past.
What in the hell are you doing, Stella? Go home!
Furious with myself, I resigned to transfer my ticket to a later flight and stop the madness before I looked up to see a neon sign directly above me. I winced at the flickering, bright yellow letters that stood out blatantly, blinking at me like a fucking wink.
Drive. Drive. Drive.
Alamo. Drive happy.
My feet moved before I had a chance to think it through—before I could reason with myself that I was being overly dramatic and that the news didn’t make a bit of difference in my life. I was in charge of myself and my reaction. All of these thoughts filtered through my sense of reason and were batted away by the slow leak of disappointment in my chest.
When it came to the men in my life, my emotions were my kryptonite, and so was my indecision.
And that day at the airport, I was, again, crippled by both.
I was driving.
I rolled my suitcase down to slot fifty-two and unlocked the Nissan Altima with the fob before I threw my suitcase in the trunk. Inside the musty cabin, I pressed my forehead to the steering wheel, started the car, and rolled down the window. The cool air hit me, waking me up from my exhausted stupor. I looked at the clock on the dash. It had only been three hours since I did my podcast.
Three hours.
Buckling up, I pulled my phone from my backpack to start directions. I already had more notifications than I could handle in a week, and the emails just kept coming in. Six hundred unanswered texts were waiting, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at any of it. I prompted Siri and gave her my home address and put the car in gear while she sounded out the first of the directions.
My five-hour flight turned into over twenty hours of driving. I was pissed at myself, pissed at Lexi, just . . . pissed. I slammed the car back into park and banged on the steering wheel. Even in the silent car, the music wouldn’t stop. It refused to loosen its tight hold. The noose was around my heart, squeezing like a vise. The wound was opening, and I was helpless to stop it. It bled as a reminder of where I’d been. And if I couldn’t stop it, then I would embrace it. Whatever I had left, whatever part of me needed closure had revealed I would have to relive it, piece-by-piece, song-by-song.
But I didn’t really believe in closure.
No, closure was an excuse for some, a scapegoat for others. But, that myth didn’t do anything but temporarily stifle the ache of missing someone. And after that phone call, that text, that brief meeting, that moment in time where it was assumed you could move on, realization strikes that all it really did was reset the timer on the heartbreak.
Love doesn’t die, even when you stop feeding it. There is no expiration date on the ache of missing someone you shared your heart, life, and body with.
Pulling my phone from the seat, I hesitated only a second before I flipped to the playlist I had made years ago. If I was going to indulge myself, I was going to do it properly.
White-knuckling the wheel, I fought traffic for a solid half hour before I finally hit the freeway and made it safely out of the city. I had hundreds of miles of open highway until I took my first exit.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I pushed play.
Mr. Brightside
The Killers
2005
“Stella, hurry up!”
“I’m coming!” I yelled to my sister, Paige, who was making her way down the crushed-shell cement steps toward her car. Locking her front door, I gripped the phone to my ear while it rang as I slowly descended her apartment stairs. The call went unanswered like it had for the past week. When his voicemail picked up, I fought the angry tears that tried to surface.
“It’s me, but you know that.” Inhaling deep, I force myself to remain steady, though inside I felt the rejection like a million bee stings. He’d taken up two months of my life, a small amount of my devotion, and he wouldn’t be taking anything else. The pain of his indifference morphed into anger as my sister honked obnoxiously from her car. “I guess . . .” I swallowed hard, talking to a small piece of me I’d never get back. “I guess fuck you is in order, Dylan. Take care.” I hung up, let two tears fall, and then wiped them away before I reached the idling car. Once seated in the back, Paige looked me over to assess the damage with knowing eyes as her boyfriend, Neil, backed us away from the curb.
“Still no answer?”
I shook my head before I lifted my shoulders and let them drop. “It’s over.”
Paige frowned. “He’s an asshole.”