Doritos, drinking, despondency, despising, dialing, do-overs, dating. This is the necessary cycle of a break-up. My gay friends tell me the cycle differs for them slightly (thankfully, they don’t seem to do as much of the dialing and do-overs, but they have more disbelief and degradation), but nevertheless there is a grief cycle involved in a break-up. Of course, some people substitute Double Dutch Chocolate Ice Cream for the Doritos, but I’ve always been a salty food kind of girl.
“So what did Prick Boy do?” my sister Allyson said as baby Fagan slept for the first time that day. My daughter Leah lay on the floor watching “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” and I polished off another bag of Doritos. I was thinking that maybe I’d already made it into the anger and despising part, or at least she had.
“It wasn’t what he did so much as what he didn’t do or what he couldn’t do. He just couldn’t trust me. It makes you wonder,” I said. I looked around for a new bottle of wine.
“This too shall pass,” said my Uncle Tim wryly, and he mercifully provided a new glass of wine as if he knew what I needed.
I surrendered myself to the cocoon of self-pity flanked by the solid support of my two sisters. It is a time-honored tradition, this. They say you have to go through stages of grief in order to move on. I think this is true when you’ve lost a relationship as well as a loved one.
I handed Allyson the Doritos and we finished watching Willy Wonka in peaceful silence.
copyright © 2009 Tiia Jones
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