139: Break

“I’m just sick and tired of your self-righteous bullshit!” she screamed as she tore something down from a shelf. Whatever it was hit the carpeted floor with a crack. I hoped it wasn’t anything valuable, but everything in that place was. It was the home we’d built together, all the little things we’d collected, the spit and glue and mortar between the bricks of our little love-box. And she was systematically destroying it—

—no, that wasn’t true. I helped. If she was the dynamite blowing everything to shit, then I’d been the lit fuse that had ignited the destruction.

I knew that she wasn’t just sick and tired of my self-righteous bullshit. There were many other tiny things, little cracks that had formed in the façade of our relationship over the years. It was the thing that came most readily to her lips as an abusive one-off, a focal point for her anger. She wasn’t wrong, either. I was self-righteous, and it was bullshit. But she’d known that about me since forever, long before we’d cemented our union with a legally binding contract.

“I know,” I shouted back.

“You don’t know shit!” she screamed and broke something else. It was time to go.

2014.09.23 – 2023.05.19

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