May 21, 1986: I woke up in great pain. She called this morning and requested that I meet her in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store (since her parents were in town helping her to move away). My roommate drove me to the store to meet her. He and I each gave her a note. She gave me a note too. The exchange lasted only a few minutes. She tried to ignore my pain.
Her note read: "Dummy, I want you to forget me. just give up. I knew it wouldn't work. I am not brave enough to talk to them and they are not also brave enough to talk about it or to face the truth. Please try to forget me in a good way and go on with you life. I will always going to think about you and you will be the only love in my whole life.
"I love you [signed in Farsi] "I am so truely sorry it ended this way."
My roommate visited with her later in the day at her house (where I couldn't go). He told me that she had been crying constantly in front of her family and had lost between five and ten pounds in just a few days, but they pretended not to notice her condition.
May 22, 1986: In spite of her note of two days ago, I was determined to keep a months' long promise to her that I would speak to her father to show him my sincerity. I approached him in the grocery store, scared out of my mind. He was alone. He couldn't speak English, and I could speak only five or ten words of Farsi (silly words that she had taught me and which did me absolutely no good in that situation). But it worked. The next day he and one of her brothers met me in the city park (why there, I don't know). The brother, whom I had met months earlier in happier times, was there to act as translator. I spent an hour pouring my heart out to them, but I was severely handicapped by her requirement that I not admit to having been in her company since last fall (she had promised them). They were very polite, but they had already made up their minds. They also told me that she had promised them, prior to their coming to the park, that she would honor their wishes and end the relationship (and to move away forever, as had been planned since before she moved to town). She has asked them to pass that message on to me.
I had wasted my breath. I had been courageous in a lost cause. I had been abandoned by my ally during the heat of battle.
I can almost remember not feeling my body as I stood there and watched them drive away.
May 24, 1986: I awoke at 5:20 A.M. and went to my post in the alley behind my house (by sheer coincidence, she lived in a house that was only 100 yards away). I watched them pack their possessions into two cars. She saw me and looked my way on a few occasions, but only when she was certain no one would see her doing so. Shortly before they were to leave forever, I passed a very angry note to her through her back-yard fence. That in itself was quite a dangerous undertaking. In order to get it to her, I gestured with my arm that I was going to meet her at the corner of the fence in her back yard. I had to go the long way around, so no one in her large family would see me. The house next to hers had a large wooden fence bordering the alley, which kept me hidden. Just as I approached the end of that fence and was peeking around the corner of it into her yard, a very large dog began barking from the other side of the wooden fence, scaring the hell out of me. I was already scared to death that someone in her family would see me... I was quite surprised to find her waiting there to grab the note through the wire. I said a single angry sentence to her, and her only words were to warn me to leave before I got caught. This I did. I can no longer remember how I learned her reaction to my note, but it seems that she may have called me (for just a few seconds) to tell me how mean I was in the note (a first for me). I certainly did not apologize.
At 7:50 AM, not long after I gave her the note, they left in two different cars.
Just like someone who has been smashed head on by a speeding truck -- but is still conscious -- I was in complete shock. I knew very well what I would be feeling soon. Until that time arrived, though, I knew I would just have to suffer with the knowledge and dwell on tasks of the moment.
As I remember that day, I can still see her family as they drove out of town. I watched helplessly from the sidewalk. Her father just happened to see me from the car he was riding in. I wanted to see him dead. As she looked at me from the back seat of her car, I had absolutely no ability to do or to think anything. I just stared.
Then she was gone.
I was left standing at the entrance to the alley by my apartment.
The rest of the day is a strange combination of vivid clarity and vague confusion. I remember storming up the walk, through the gate and into the house. As I headed down the stairs into my very cold and empty dungeon apartment, I immediately decided to shave off my mustache. In a happier time she had jokingly told me she would leave me if ever I shaved it off. In the end it was I who would shave it off because she had left me. It was a completely empty gesture on my part, but I must have thought it was the only way to make as much of an instant identity change as possible. If I could see myself in even the slightest way as a different person, then I might actually fool my self-destruct mechanism for a while longer.
I stared into the mirror, as I had done so many times before when considering making this move (before I had met her); however, this time I debated only for a moment. I quickly set to the task before I could stop myself. After three years of uninterrupted claim to my upper lip, the mustache did not come off easily. I worked very hard and very angrily. The anger was an extremely vain and intentional attempt to prevent the onset of the pain that I knew was going to come no matter what.
Finally, I was free of it. I was naked, as I had not remembered seeing myself in three years. It was as if I had taken myself back to a time long before I knew her. In this way my mind had a memory upon which it could attempt to concentrate, thereby extending my shock and numbness a little further. I wondered how people would look at me now. It seemed that the rest of my face had sagged in the past three years, and my upper lip stayed too young and puffy under its time capsule. What would she think if she came back suddenly, unable to leave me after all? What would she say when she saw it gone? She would know she had better say nothing.
But I knew she would not return.
I continued in my effort to erase her from my life. I went immediately into my bedroom and began deliberately to remove from my sight every bit of her memorabilia, the stuff she had given me: the Valentine heart; the ring; a hand-woven shawl; a crystal bird; a seashell from the Gulf of Mexico, plus numerous other trinkets of affection. I stuffed them all into a small drawer where they could not taunt me, and where I could violate their meaning by pretending I had never had them. I hated what they stood for even as I put them away. During this time I labored to think ahead in terms of physical tasks, specifically those that would purge her from my memory. I had to work quickly. If I could build just enough protection to hinder temporarily the major onslaught of pain which I felt coming, I might... No, I had no idea what might happen. I was just reacting much the same as a chicken does which has just had its head cut off. I was running around completely lost, with the ultimate end already past.
I looked around at this room of mine which had held so many exquisite memories, and I decided to move everything to my roommate's room. He had graduated from college and had moved out of the apartment only two days earlier to return home. He had given me more support and assistance than anyone else who actually knew about her and me. Now he was gone, at a time when I needed company most of all.
So I worked.
And I worked to exhaustion for the rest of the morning and afternoon, the whole time wondering why I was feeling compelled to move out of my room, a room that I really liked. In the end, it was a meaningless gesture, just as meaningless as shaving off my mustache (it may even have been harmful).
I didn't move far enough away.
But at that time I couldn't leave town. I demanded of heaven that her phone call should come at any time, because I knew she couldn't continue this total farce in the face of all the pain she had to be feeling. If her pain was anything remotely similar to the pain which I was denying (so far), then she couldn't go far without calling me. It had caused her to do so many times before.
During the transfer of items from one room to the other and at various other times that day (all day, actually), I talked to myself, and to any good spirits who might have been anywhere near, in the harshest, most hateful manner. Keep in mind that I swore very little in those days (still don't) and never for public consumption.
"Life! F*** life! F*** love! What a joke we all are! This is it. This is what's meant for me. I had better accept it. Yep. Yep. Yep... Oh, my God! No! I won't think it! No! I am alone now. She betrayed me. She broke her promise. No! I won't even think about it! Oh, no. Now, if I move that stand over here... F*** it all! I had better not think for the rest of my life."
And that was how the task-filled day went. Nighttime was what I feared most.
When it came - and it did come - I couldn't breathe. Plain and simple. I doubled up in bed and couldn't breathe. I was being asphyxiated. I couldn't breathe, and there was no one who could help me. I had never been so conscious before in my entire life. I was the focal point of pain and existence. I existed. The pain existed, and there was no separation of the two. The entire sum of humanity, the spirits of those who had suffered excruciatingly slow, merciless deaths, who had prayed desperately for deliverance and received none, descended upon my room that night to paint a tapestry of reality as I had only distantly imagined it before. And I doubled up even further, gasping for air, but not wanting the life it would continue to bring to me. God, bring temporary sleep at least, permanent sleep at most.
