It was four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in December, and I was shredding page by page out of a copy of The Graveyard Book in the courtyard of my apartment complex with a lit cigarette tucked between my lips.
I wasn’t a regular smoker, but when news trickles down the social grapevine that the person who you thought was the love of your life broke up with you in order to get back with their ex, in that moment you have a choice of three things to put into your mouth: a shot of whiskey, the genitals of a stranger, or a cigarette. Because I could suck it down hands-free while I shredded this book, I chose the last option. The other two were now on the table for once the sun went down.
The book I was annihilating had belonged to my now former partner, Neil, who had lent it to my sister. I was tasked with giving it back to him but had been dumped before I could return it. By the just and fair laws of breakups, this book was now my property, and I was treating it as a proxy of its former owner as I callously ripped page after page from the spine. This was the first book I had ever purposefully ruined, and I didn’t feel good about it. In truth, I myself had loved both the book and the author, but this particular copy represented not only a failure but also a roundhouse kick to the face.
It had to be destroyed.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and read the message from my sister again. “Neil is back with Heidi. I’m really sorry I’m telling you this, but I think you should know in case you’re holding out in any way.” Which, of course, I had been. Only a couple weeks had passed, and I was convinced he would come to his senses very soon. Especially since he had called me one week later to come have, as he put it, “weird emotional sex” the night before his birthday. I wish I could say that I was strong enough to say no to this trap, but it only further ingrained the notion that he would snap out of whatever he was dealing with and we would be reunited.
Upon receiving the message from my sister, however, the rose-tinted glasses had been stepped on and shattered, and the fog was clearing to reveal an iceberg of Titanic-sinking proportions. I took all of the gifts he had given me for my own birthday and dumped them straight into the trash, then snatched his copy of The Graveyard Book off of my shelf along with the lighter and box of American Spirits on my nightstand, and went outside to smoke and shred my feelings.
As I continued to evict pages from their spinal home, I thought back to how my heartbreak and turmoil over this man began.
Three years prior, I had moved to Portland. My sister followed soon after, and we were both living together in the basement of an Episcopal church that our friends were caretakers of. Our rooms were cold and dark former religious classrooms in the basement with no light fixtures and no curtains. While we lived there, Amanda took to scoping out the surrounding neighborhood and discovered a surprisingly classy cocktail lounge with elegant cocktails and handsome bearded men who served them to you. She would come home to the church raving about the place. She insisted that I come with, and that I would love it. “Just to get you out of the house,” she said.
So I did, and she was right; it was exactly my kind of place. We would make ourselves pretty, put on nice dresses, order fancy cocktails, and lap up the attention we were given. Very early on, possibly even my first visit to the place, I noticed one of the bartenders in particular. He was tall, had tattoos, gauged ears, wearing a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and too many of the top buttons unbuttoned, polyester slacks, a cabbie hat, and sported a beard that Rasputin himself would have butchered dynasties for. As far as I can tell, this is seemingly the overall required uniform men here are issued upon being granted entry to Portland.
I was smitten.
Smitten. Infatuated. I was absolutely enamored with this cartoon villain of a man. My chest tightened when I looked at him, and my vision blurred, as if I were looking directly at the sun. I discovered that Rasputin’s name was Neil and outright ignored the second fact that I learned, which was that he had a girlfriend in what seemed to be an unhealthy on-again-off-again carousel of a relationship. “It won’t last,” I hoped to myself, in what was absolutely none of my business and an embarrassment to reflect on. “We are going to end up dating. I’ll elbow my way in on their off-time, and that will be that.” I would say this to my sister, to the rest of the bartenders, to the other patrons I made friends with, to anyone who would listen, all with an inflated sense of confidence. They all, each and every one of them, gave me strong warnings to stay away from Rasputin. I defiantly ignored them.
And then, after two and a half years of showing up in his bar every few months and batting my eyelashes at him, a message from Neil appeared on my phone overnight while I was sleeping, asking me if he could take me on a date. A date that I had waited patiently for two and a half years; a date that led to a seemingly perfect relationship. A relationship that had ended with my head hitting the windshield of what I thought would be the last car I would ever drive.
Before the break-up, I had collected a batch of presents to give to Neil for his birthday. They included a few items I thought he’d like, along with the grand prize: a mint condition hardcover special sleeve edition of The Graveyard Book, signed by both Neil Gaiman, the author, and Dave McKean, the illustrator. I couldn’t believe I had found this most perfect of all gifts to give the biggest Gaiman fan I knew, who rattled on about him at every chance given. Additionally, he did not remember lending his own original copy to my sister and didn’t know where it was. I spent $150 on this gift and purchased it a month and a half in advance, and was electrified with joy when it arrived. Would he be speechless? Would he cry? Would he propose? I opened my browser and started looking at rings, joking to my boss about how bizarre it would be if we broke up before I could give it to him.
Fate is a funny thing sometimes. Maybe funny isn’t the right word. Perhaps “heartbreaking” or “educational” instead.
The morning after I had been dumped, I threw together the presents that I had collected for Neil’s birthday into a paper bag and drove to his house, hurtling the bag down the concrete steps of the basement leading to his door in hopes that it would break both the porcelain cat and the coffee mug that were inside. It was a petty and childish thing to do, and I reveled in it. I couldn’t return most of the gifts, and I didn’t want to give them to anyone I knew for fear that I would have to see them and be reminded of their origin. And then there was the simple fact that I just plain wanted him to feel bad because I felt like dying.
I sucked down the last of my cigarette and put it out on the ground, then started to gather the pages of the literary holocaust I had rendered. Balancing a mountain of shredded pages in my arms, I took them back into my apartment and threw them onto my couch to deal with later. The gifts I had thrown away earlier gaped at me from the trash can: copies of The Magicians and The Wee Free Men, a book on calligraphy for beginners, a collection of fountain pens, and a bottle of ink.
I walked to the trash and pulled them out, one by one. I put the books away on my shelves, and the pens and ink away in my drawers. I typed out a final message to Neil, telling him that I knew he had used me as a placeholder for the relationship he was truly invested in and that I had loved him, and then I blocked him.
Because when it comes down to it, like all the others who came before and after him, Rasputin was just a man. He was a fraud, and the Romanovs figured it out. In the end, he had no power over anyone. It was an illusion.
I grabbed my coat and opened the door to leave, but not before casting a look back at the books I had restored to my shelf. I could always shred them later if I felt like it, but there was no sense in wasting a good fountain pen.
Flicking the flame to life, I lit up another cigarette, closed the door, and started walking to the bar around the corner where there would be whiskey and strangers waiting for me.