It’s the morning after I’ve been dumped, and my head feels like someone is standing on it.
I awake with a hangover that I’m convinced the Lord weaponized as biblical punishment to those who prioritized dancing around golden cows over bellowing off-key hymns in His honor while hunched over on cold, wooden pews.
As I’m fumbling for my phone on the nightstand, the events of the night before start to replay for me, like a horror film running at a half-distorted speed.
“I need to tell you something,” my then-boyfriend—we’ll call him Neil—had said, taking my hand in both of his giant mitts, like he planned to slip me a tip. We were sitting on an outrageous velvet futon in his basement apartment. It was stiff and ugly, and I hated sitting on it, yet here I was, about to be broken up with on a velvet fucking futon. A Knight’s Tale played on TV because I had never seen it before. I had been there for hours, and we had already watched Dracula, and an X-Men movie that I cannot remember anything about.
“And you’re probably gonna hate me for it.”
Oh.
Oh.
It was at this point that I leaned down and started putting on my shoes. I didn’t need him to say anything more, but he did.
“I just need some time alone. And I don’t think I should be with anybody right now.”
Any idiot knows that this is, of course, code for, “I don’t want to be with you.”
By now I had sleeved my coat on and shouldered my bag. I stood in his living room, ready to bolt like a spooked deer, but instead was frozen, unmoving in disbelief.
My mind felt very far away from my body. I heard myself say out loud, “I can’t believe this is happening again.”
Neil wore an expression of guilt that I suspect had more to do with the fact that he felt uncomfortable rather than genuinely feeling sorrow for delivering to me what was beginning to feel like a mortal blow.
“We’ve been sitting here watching TV for four hours,” I said, accusingly, both a little louder than necessary and not as loud as I wanted to be.
“Well, I had to work up the courage.”
“For four hours?”
“Yeah.”
In retrospect, it wasn’t a completely surprising turn of events. He had left to smoke six or seven times since I had arrived that night, a considerable increase from his normal once or twice per evening. His palms were sweaty in my hand and on my leg as we sat together on the couch, so much so that I had constantly been separating our hands and wiping mine off in order to continue sitting comfortably beside him. He had been distant for a couple of weeks, which felt like centuries leading up to this night. I had known there was something wrong but didn’t want to believe it. Instead, I largely blamed his reclusion from me on the fact that he was a full-blown alcoholic bartender trying his hand at “a sober month.” I convinced myself that it was all just a temporary thing and that when he finished in another week, he would be back to his old self: perpetually drunk and universally enamored with me, instead of sober and repelled by me.
On the TV, Heath Ledger was angrily calling Shannyn Sossamon a silly girl and storming off camera. That was how I was feeling right at that moment. Like a silly girl.
My eyes fell to his pocked and banged-up thrift store coffee table. I had brought him some books, which sat next to a giant bag of weed I had also brought over for him. I had labored over that weed. The neighbors who lived next door to me had a secret backyard farm, viewable only from my house. After harvesting what they needed and could sell, they had invited myself and my roommate to come pick whatever we wanted. I came away with three grocery bags full of small but plentiful nuggets, then lovingly trimmed and dried them, and finally bagged a little less than half of my own harvest and brought it here, where it now sat next to the books. Books that I realized now, quite regrettably, would never be read.
I thought about scooping everything off of the table and dumping it into my purse in one swift motion of the arm and leaving, but that seemed too dramatic a gesture in the middle of being broken up with—to take back the gifts I had brought him that very night. Instead, I decided I would be satisfied to leave it for him, knowing he would think about me when smoking the weed and if he ever did finish the books.
It’s the little revenges you tell yourself you need in order to get through these kinds of things.
In what I decided would be less passive aggressive than snatching away gifts I had brought, I started scanning his bookshelves for the copies of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls that I had lent him a couple of weeks earlier. He had an unfortunate thing for vampires, and I had been through an unfortunate teen goth phase. In order to be a teen goth, you are legally required to be in possession of no less than seven books concerning vampires at any one time, or they send the Goth Police after you. This type of infraction is second only to being interrogated by the Goth Fashion Police; a much more severe precinct. I couldn’t leave the apartment without my signed Anne Rice books in my hands, or I would never see them again.
“Where are the vampire books I lent you?” I was doing my best to stay calm, but my voice was unnecessarily shrill for such a silly demand I never thought I’d have to make at nearly thirty years old. I was getting ready to cry, or worse, yell; maybe both. I had to get out of there.
He pulled the books down from the shelf lining his ceiling, the likes of which would have been particularly humiliating for me to attempt at reaching, especially while still in the process of being dumped. He handed them to me without saying anything. I threw them in my bag and stormed toward the door, slamming it a little too hard behind me, and stomped up the stairs outside to a crisp, drizzling night.
My phone was in my hand the second the door closed, dialing my sister, Amanda. “Neil just dumped me,” I said into the phone when she picked up. It was then that the full weight of the words that I was speaking out loud hit me like a train. It started calm, and then, quite without warning, descended into a caterwauling, otherworldly wail. It was the kind of wail that people might stop to wonder, is that a person, or is it instead an abused hellcat escaping from the breaking of the seventh seal?
“I’m hyperventilating. I think I’m having a panic attack.”
In what was the first and most obvious cure, she said, “Let’s get some drinks in you.” (Sidenote: get yourself a sister to get through your breakups.)
We drove to a dive bar down the street from my house. I ordered drinks calmly and then sat gracefully down at a booth, where I promptly began to cry.
While crying and rattling off my dissatisfaction about my current situation to Amanda, a group of people were leaving the bar, and behind them, they were also leaving behind the ends of a sheet cake on one of their tables.
I eyed the cake furiously between tears and up-ending gins into my open maw. I had been dumped and then walked into a bar to find an abandoned cake waiting for me.
This was fate.
Amanda tried to nervously hush my broken-hearted wailing, but nothing came of her attempts. I kept swallowing gin and tonics and refusing to dilute my blood with water, the cake invading my thoughts just as much as my failed relationship was.
She caught me staring at the cake between sobs. “Don’t you go anywhere near that cake,” she accused, jabbing her finger at me to seal her insistence.
“What?” I scoffed, incredulous with offense. “I’m not going to eat that thing. It’s probably from Walmart. It probably tastes like cardboard.” The saliva gathering in the corners of my mouth betrayed the disingenuous words rolling off my tongue. It was an outrageous lie. I wanted that cake. I wanted it badly.
“I said don’t touch it. It’s a trash cake. It could be a drug cake. Look around at where we are.”
I eyed the bar’s patrons, quizzically wondering which one of them was a drug user. Maybe all of them. I wondered if any of them would have any drugs they could sell me. “Do you take Venmo?” I’d ask, eyes wide with hope, the app already loaded on my phone.
“Drug users don’t put drugs in their cakes. You’re thinking of potheads.”
“If I were a drug user, I’d put drugs in my cake. Why not combine the best of both things in your life at the moment?”
“I’m going to eat that fucking cake.”
“You could get AIDS! Don’t you dare touch that cake. It’s a trash cake.”
I hadn’t touched the cake, and now, the next morning, was regretting it tremendously. AIDS sounded like a much more legitimate thing to spend my time worrying about instead of heartbreak. Again.
And now I was left with this monumental hangover, and there was no cake. It was then that I wondered if I had anymore Adderall.
At this time in my life, I was not medically prescribed Adderall, though I should have been. Nonetheless, a handful of them found their way into my possession after I had dropped a dollar bill on the bar floor of an open mic I was attending some months ago and found something under the bar bench that was better than the value of a dollar. Pills.
Eleven of them, in fact. How do I know this? Certainly not from crawling around on the floor of a bar in a brazen attempt to corral them. When I found them, I wondered if I should tell someone; no doubt they belonged to one of my comedy colleagues attending the bar for the mic—someone sharing the room with me right then. Someone who was probably feeling nervous before their set and decided they would pop one to ease their jitters, or maybe to help sharpen up their jokes, or perhaps they had forgotten to take them earlier at a more reasonable hour (a common occurrence for folks with ADHD). In a hand-shaking attempt to open the bottle, the capsules had spilled all over the ground, and the person had the good sense to not pick them up off of the floor.
I did not have good sense and was not even remotely above picking things up off of the floor to put straight into my mouth, which is how eleven Adderall pills found their way into my bag. But I used them sparingly since. I had been through two breakups since finding the pills; this would be the third. They needed to last.
I raked through my purse—a genius place to store them—for who would go searching for discarded pills in someone’s mobile Pit of Despair? I emptied the thing out onto my bed and carefully pieced between the chaotic pile of change, crumpled receipts, and rogue pieces of gum and mints, which briefly excited me until I realized what they were. There were no more magical pills to be found; only tic-tacs. I popped one in my mouth anyway, hoping that I could will a placebo effect into working. It did not.
I checked my phone. In a drunken stupor, I had posted about getting dumped on social media the night before. Unlike my inclination to crawl around on sticky bar floors looking for drugs, I did have the good sense to hide the post from my now-ex boyfriend and our mutual friends. I opened my inbox to a flood of “WHAT HAPPENED”s and “Are you okay?”s and “But I thought it was going so well!”s. . It was too much.
Additionally, I had also re-downloaded Tinder after swearing it off the last time I had used it. Not only had I re-downloaded the dating app, I had upgraded and paid for it. Unlike my pill-finding abilities, this I felt shame about. Paying for dating was sad, and only the saps did it. I was now Queen of the Saps.
I immediately wondered how I could get out of the $9.99 heartbreak charge that came with the upgraded sap service.
“You see,” I would explain to the customer service associate representing my banking institution on the phone, “I had just been dumped, and my sister had pumped me full of seven gin and tonics and was shushing me, and there was a trash cake that she told me I couldn’t have. I think that we can both agree that only a monster would deny a dumpee a cake, trash or otherwise, on the night they get broken up with, so you can see that it was at this point in the night where I might have made some unwise decisions. Hello?”
When I realized that I wouldn’t be able to get out of the sap charge, instead, I decided to enact the only breakup revenge I had some control over: changing my Netflix password and logging out all of existing sessions. If men are turning away their partners of three years in the making who come to their homes bearing weed and books, we have no choice but to pack our bags now and keep a rigor mortis death grip on our Netflix accounts, because it is quite literally all we have left.
My final memories of the night before drifted across my vision as I hit “save password” on the screen. The night had gone on, and I proceeded to down several more gin and tonics while Amanda remained stone cold sober. I cried, and I raised my voice, and she shushed me. I called him The One, she called him a Boil on the Ass of Humanity. We stayed there for hours as my tears salted the ice cubes of my empty glasses while I nattered on about my broken heart.
When the bartender asked for last calls, we gathered our coats and sidled out of the booth. I eyed the cake longingly as we passed it, turning to gaze at it while Amanda pity-paid for my drinks. She hissed and made a piratey throat-cut motion in muted threat for me to not go near the cake as she waited for her card to run.
As we left the dive bar, I looked back at the trash cake one last time, desperately wishing for the thing I wanted most in the world but couldn’t have and wondering how on earth I would find another.