Everything Was Beautiful And All Of It Hurt

A love story in five acts.

I. Devil in a Black Dress

“One day, I am going to break your fucking heart,” she confessed on my balcony in between drags of her Marlboro 27. “You sure you want to do this?”

There are only two ways for a relationship to end: Separation and death. Both options are pretty devastating, the degree of sadness at the end largely dependent on two variables — vulnerability and time elapsed. I pondered this as I locked eyes with her and smirked.

“As sure as I’ve ever been about anything in all my life.”

She scowled, tilted her head up to the heavens and howled “UGHHHHH” in a throaty roar, the kind you’d receive after making a particularly egregious food pun. “Of course you would say that.”

We’d met some months prior, as I’d drunkenly meander outside of this bar we both drank at eight nights a week, me after playing music and her after tending bar, and I’d probe her for cigarettes while she shot me side-eye in her black-on-black work getup. I maybe got 12 words in at any given moment before her scattershot attention would wander to the next shiny thing her coworker was yelling.

We’d first become friends when I, too drunk to drive, too shamed for a cab, and too weak to…