“I am,” I replied. If I wasn’t I would definitely be clearing my schedule.
“Do you want to meet me somewhere? I can text you a place when I figure something out?”
He handed me his phone to put my information into it.
“I’ll see you tonight, Emily. I’m looking forward to getting to know more about you.” He put his hand on my shoulder and gently squeezed as he turned to go check out.
I stood there for a full minute gazing at his rear end as he walked away. Letting out a breath I didn’t realize I had been holding, I literally skipped as I finished my shopping.
I felt my phone vibrate in my back pocket while I was loading my groceries into my car. Pulling it out, I glanced at my messages and saw a heart from Elliot. This was turning out to be a fantastic day, despite its beginning.
EMILY
Maggie looked at me closely. I had never mentioned Elliot before. She was still living in Minnesota at the time and to be honest, when I was with Elliot, he was my whole world. He completely consumed me. I was struggling to believe he honestly wanted me, that he loved me, so I kept him to myself. I thought if it were just the two of us, he wouldn’t leave me.
I never felt pretty enough or worthy enough for Elliot D’Arcy. To me, he was so much larger than life, and I felt small and insignificant. I was so sure, in time, he would see that and move on. I never understood what he saw in me. I looked back at the way it ended and I could see how my insecurities played into everything. I could never accept that what we shared was real. Elliot was a beautiful man I set high up onto a pedestal and then I shoved him off.
I was such a mess back then, an angry train wreck just waiting to destroy myself, and I almost succeeded.
“So what happened with this Elliot guy?” Maggie asked. “Was he the one? Did you really love the guy?”
Swallowing hard, I cleared my throat nervously. I took another sip of my wine to give myself some liquid courage and then began telling her my secret.
“What can I say about Elliot? He was a ray of light in total blackness. He was magical. Elliot could take anything evil and make it good. He was pure beauty in every sense of the word. Soft spoken and healing, just being in his presence made me want to be the best I could be. And he was so mouthwateringly beautiful to look at. His wavy, golden brown hair always needed a trim and was always a mess. His weathered face, the lines I traced with my fingertips every chance I had, the smile that never left his lips when we were together, even when I was screaming my head off about some stupid transgression my insecure mind conjured up about him.
“Elliot always seemed so calm and peaceful. He could spend hours outside just watching the world go by. He was curious about everything, looking for answers to crazy random thoughts and questions when they popped into his head.
“He would go off on these offbeat quests for days at a time trying to figure out an idea. Then he would come back and write for hours and hours … sometimes he didn’t stop writing for over twenty-four hours at a stretch. I think that’s what made his stories so great. They were an obsession with him.”
Maggie was stunned. “You never told me? Your best friend? What happened to him, to the two of you?”
I shook my head, feeling ashamed that I never confided in her and continued. Maybe after hearing the story, Maggie would understand.
“I loved him and hated him at the same time. There was a peace inside of Elliot that drew others to him. Complete strangers wanted to stand by him quietly and just breathe in his air space. It was crazy in a strange sort of way. He was everything I wasn’t, but wanted to be, and I was so damned insecure and so afraid, a very bad combination at that time in my life.
“After a while I became consumed with jealousy. I questioned everything he did, where he went, and who he spoke to. I was insane. I felt like there was this venom inside of me spilling out through the pores of my skin, hurting everyone that came close to me, especially Elliot.
“I was out of control. I didn’t know who I was or how blessed I was to have him in my life. He knew me … my flaws and imperfections, my quirks. He knew how my mind worked and the way my thoughts could just take off and get crazy.
“He loved me in spite of myself, so I began to hate him, and I destroyed us. He was so good to me and I was such a total bitch in return. I feel like I’ve been paying for it ever since the day he told me it was over and the love he had for me was gone. He walked out of my life and I have hated myself ever since.
“For a long time, I blamed him. I blamed him for everything that went wrong because I couldn’t face the truth. I didn’t want to really look at myself, to look inside of me and admit what I had become. It was me who drove him away. I have never met a man since who came close in comparison. And I do compare every man I meet to Elliot.
“He was tall, tall enough that I had to tip my head back to look up at him. Tall enough that my body fit perfectly into his arms and my head could rest in the junction of his shoulder. I loved that fit. I loved how his body rippled with strength and his golden brown hair glistened in the sunlight, his long curls dancing with a light breeze.
“When I think of Elliot, I think of poetry because nothing else comes to mind when I try to explain him. Words cannot define him. Elliot, in my eyes, was total perfection. And I destroyed the most beautiful creation ever to become tangled up in my messed up life. I think deep down I will always punish myself for what I did to him. I deserve it. I am evil to the core.”
“You are not evil!” Maggie chided me.
“Then what do you call someone who hurts the very person that loves them the most?” I asked her.
“Dumb maybe? Confused, immature? But not evil.”
I was as honest with her as I knew how to be, talking, for the first time, about how I blamed myself for the breakup. It felt like I was lifting a ten-pound weight from my heart. I’d never told anyone about Elliot.
Maggie moved to Phoenix shortly after Elliot and I split up so she never met him, and I was very good at acting like my life was good. It was too painful for me to talk about him to anyone. I wanted him to come back with every single demented cell in my body. I kept thinking he would call me and tell me it was a mistake, that he still loved me.
Everything he left at my house was still there. His navy cotton robe hung in my bathroom on a hook next to the shower and some of his clothes in my closet, jeans and a few shirts. I still wore the shirts around the house sometimes like I did when we were together. He always laughed because his shirts came to my knees like a dress. He loved it because I never wore anything else underneath.
A bottle of Elliot’s favorite cologne was still on my dresser where I could see it whenever I looked that way.
Occasionally, after a particularly emotional or lonely day, I would mist a tiny bit on myself and inhale deeply. Closing my eyes, I could imagine him standing next to me and my world would be good once again. Or the long nights when insomnia wouldn’t leave me alone, I sprayed it on my sheets and prayed he would come to me in my dreams as I wrapped my body tightly around a pillow … pretending.
I waited for a long time, but nothing. Why would he? I never deserved him in the first place. I knew I was damaged somehow.
To look at me on the surface, you wouldn’t see it. I never let anyone look too deep. I didn’t want to see their pity or their disgust. I was afraid … of what I wasn’t really sure. Maybe because of who I was, what I did to him, I didn’t deserve to find love? I had to quit thinking about Elliot. I really needed to move on and start living again. Maybe then I would find love or it would find me. The real kind of love. But first I needed to change.
Maggie was quiet as she listened to my tale of Elliot. I didn’t see the pity or the disgust in her eyes that I feared I would, just sadness.
She reached over and hugged me.
“You are not cruel, Em. You’re not,” she assured me. “You were young. We all make mistakes when we’re young and dumb. You don’t realize what you have until someti
mes it’s too late. We all look back and think of how we could have done things differently. We have regrets. It hurts when we lose someone, no matter what the circumstances. We each have our own shit to work through and sometimes we have to go away to do it or we can’t deal with the pain. Once we figure it out, we’re better for it. Then if that person we walked away from is still there, loving us, it’s meant to be.”
“What if they don’t come back?” I asked.
“Then there is someone else so beautiful and so utterly perfect for us that they will eclipse the one who left, and you will finally understand why they had to go,” she answered.
I thought about that for a few minutes while I sipped my wine. I hoped she was right. I hated the guilt I carried around me like a harness.
Her voice broke into my thoughts. “Quit punishing yourself!” she told me gently. “I know you, Em, you think you don’t deserve love because you blame yourself for hurting him. That’s bullshit. You deserve love like all the rest of us. You can’t keep thinking that because you screwed up when you were too young to really understand yourself, that no one could love you. It’s unrealistic and so wrong on every level. Let it go.”
“Easier said than done,” I replied with a smile. “Do you have the magic cure for that?”
“I wish I did. Everyone always tells me the answer is time.”
“I hate that answer.” I gave a sad laugh.
I was impatient, impulsive, and always in a hurry, and I realized it was part of my downfall. I needed patience in a big way. The problem was I needed it now. When I looked back, I knew I’d compared every guy I’d met to Elliot, every single one of them. And they all came up short. They always would.
I wanted them to make me forget. It didn’t work. It was still Elliot’s face I wanted to see when I woke up in the morning and Elliot’s voice whispering in my ear as I fell asleep.
I had sex with other men, but it wasn’t love. And no matter how hard I tried to duplicate what I had with Elliot, it fell short. It was just a body next to me at night so I didn’t have to feel alone. I couldn’t find it in my heart to love any one of them. Not when Elliot still held my soul. The sex? It just made me all the more lonely and sad.
“Hey Emily, maybe your secret admirer that left you the rose could be the one who helps you forget.” Maggie suggested, trying to snap me back into a positive mood.
“Maybe.” I laughed. But somehow, I didn’t think so.
EMILY
“Come on!” I encouraged everyone over my shoulder. “You can do it! We can do it!”
I couldn’t believe I was up at the butt crack of dawn to climb Camelback Mountain. I also couldn’t believe it was my brilliant idea. It wasn’t scaling up cliffs with ropes or the kind of crazy things I saw on TV, it was a simple hiking trail. At times it was a bit tricky navigating around the rocks and boulders and it was steep in spots, but I had to say, it was a great workout.
I met Maggie and Andrea in the parking lot of Echo Canyon at five thirty. It was amazing how many cars were already there this early in the morning; the lot was almost full. Andrea had mentioned, when I brought up the idea, that Camelback was really busy on the weekend when the weather was nice.
Cholla Trail was a little less than a mile and a half long. We were assured it was one of the easier trails to hike, and since we were beginners, we figured we should start with that one. After twenty minutes of hiking, it didn’t feel like a beginner’s trail to me.
“I’m trying to remember why I decided to do this,” I puffed as I spoke, climbing around a group of boulders and joining the other hikers at one of the ridges, waiting.
“WOW!” I exclaimed, forgetting my complaints from just a minute ago. To the east, I watched as the sun was rising up in the sky. “It’s absolutely breathtaking up here!”
In all the time I had lived there, I had never been up on Camelback. In fact, there were a lot of local attractions I had never taken the time to visit before. In the last few months I had seen museums out in the desert, ancient Indian ruins, and even gone on a pink jeep tour through the hills on Sedona.
I still had those melancholy days where I felt so damn lonely I just wanted to curl up on my bed and either cry or wallow in self-pity, but I was sticking to my no dating decision. Getting outside and trying new things was helping. I’d even discovered I liked it.
“Come on,” I encouraged the girls. “Let’s keep going. It’s been fairly easy so far, but I read it gets a little rougher up ahead where it’s called the ‘saddle’ … that’s when we get our workout in.”
As we hit the big incline farther up, we had to scramble a bit to get to the top, moving back and forth in a switchback pattern, when the path became really steep. My thighs were burning like fire as I climbed over the last ridge.
Bent over with her hands resting on the tops of her legs, Maggie moaned. “Damn! I thought I was in much better shape than this. Holy crap, my legs hurt,” she whined.
“Just think of how good your legs and your ass will look after we do this a few dozen times,” I told her.
“My ass and my legs are just fine, thank you very much! And since you talked me into this, I think you should carry me back down.”
We found a group of boulders that made a great place to relax and drink some of the water we carried in our packs. Everyone we told about our upcoming adventure reminded us to hydrate constantly.
It was a whole different world up here, so quiet and serene. I felt like I could inhale deep breaths of clean air, filling my body and my mind with purity and all things good. Then exhale all the bullshit that accumulated inside of me. Breathe out the pollution of anger and doubt, self-condemnation that I allowed to fill up inside of me. Up here, I could just let it all go and work on becoming me.
There was no distracting noise surrounding me. I didn’t see pop cans and paper lying around. No cigarette butts tossed amongst the rocks. The morning was so amazingly clear that every direction I looked, I could see for miles in the distance. I glanced over at Maggie and Andrea, standing a few feet away from me. Both of them looked so relaxed, even after the energy it took to hike up here.
I walked over and sat down on a large boulder next to them. Andrea sat beside me.
“Is this the first time you’ve been up here?” she asked.
“I’m embarrassed to admit it, but yes. I’ve heard about it, wanted to hike up here, but just never did. I’m finding out there are a lot of things I’ve never done that I’d like to,” I admitted.
“Life gets like that sometimes. The ideas are there, but actually doing something about it? That can be the hard part.”
Maggie joined us on the boulder. “I agree, but I’m not sure if it’s laziness or I’m just too damn busy that I don’t take the time to enjoy life.”
“Honestly, I don’t know if it’s either. It takes work to change your routine. And staying busy, too busy, I think that’s a bit of a safety net for a lot of single women like us.”
Both Maggie and I turned to Andrea, wanting to hear more.
“In what way?” Maggie asked her.
“Being too busy is a great excuse for not doing something. I’d like to try that new restaurant, but I don’t have any extra time. A vacation to a new resort? Too much work, I can’t take off right now. Maybe next year. Take the time to exercise and eat healthy? It takes too much time and I have work to finish. I hear the excuses all day long. To be really honest, I use the same ones myself. We all do.”
“Me too,” I agreed. “I caught myself coming up with excuses every time I’d tell myself I was going to join a yoga studio. I finally ignored the inner demon and did it.”
Andrea turned to me. “Are you glad you did it?”
“Completely. I feel so much better now that I’m working out and eating better. It took a while and I still have my days, but I’m glad I did it,” I admitted.
“Do you find yourself in a better mood most of the time? Making better decisions about things?” Andrea asked.
“Me too,” agreed Maggie. “I know I feel better and I have a lot more energy lately.”
I thought about it for a minute. I had been more peaceful lately or maybe I should say less agitated.
We spent the rest of the morning hiking around the trails, exploring, talking, and laughing. The best part was the laughter. I tried to remember when I had forgotten to laugh. This felt good, really good. I let everything go that had been bothering me during the week and just enjoyed the moments we were sharing. I was surrounded by beauty and great friends. What more could I really want out of life?
We headed back down the Cholla Trail a little after noon. True to her words, Maggie tried to convince me that I had to carry her. I wasn’t going for it, not by a long shot.
Andrea took off while Maggie and I hung around the parking lot a bit longer.
“What have you got going on the rest of the day?” I asked her.
“Not a lot,” she answered. “Just going through some things at home. What are you doing?”
“I’m thinking along the same lines as you are. I’m feeling boxed in, so I’m getting rid of stuff. Kind of like throwing out my old life. I need to call my security company, too, this afternoon. I want to ask about a security camera for outside.” I didn’t think about it as I told this to Maggie, but I saw the look of concern on her face.
“What’s going on? Why do you think you need that?”
“I’m not sure I do. I just have this strange feeling of someone watching me. I’m probably being paranoid, but I was careless for a while about setting the alarm, and I just have a creepy feeling lately. I could smell stale cigarette smoke a few times. Not overbearing, but the kind of odor that clings to clothing after a while and lingers? I don’t know anyone who still smokes, so I’m really sensitive to the smell. I’ve been careful lately about making sure everything is locked and the alarm is on, but I thought maybe a camera monitoring movements outside might alleviate this jitteriness I have.”
Shattered Pearls Page 4