I Was Forever Changed

I opened the back garage door, holding her collar in my hand. It had been raining heavily for the last few hours. This was my first day home alone since we had to put my childhood dog, Emily, to sleep. The weather perfectly matched how I was feeling inside when just a few days before, I said my final goodbyes to my lifelong friend. I closed my eyes and shook her collar to hear her tags jingling one last time.

Over the years, I had grown accustomed to dodging the 70 pound Golden Retriever who would bolt through the open door as I stood there, but today there would be no dodging. I stood with my eyes closed, tags jingling, and began to cry, missing my friend deeply. Though my Nana had recently succumbed to the cancer she had been battling for nearly ten years, losing Emily was the deepest loss I had known and felt in a profound way.

I remembered one particularly lengthy fight my parents had gotten into a few years back. I always had such bad anxiety and was very scared when they fought, oftentimes locking myself in my room with a hinge lock I had installed on my door, but this fight was very different. It was toward the end of my parents' marriage; the side of me that had fancied myself a Dr. Phil type had long since stopped trying to think I could help them resolve their issues. Instead of fighting my anxiety and installing myself in the middle of their harsh words, I opted for full retreat. Their fights were typically textbook in their execution; mom said this, dad responded like that, fast forward 4 hours and dad would get in his truck and leave, mom would stay in her room for the rest of the night. I knew it would be hours before either noticed I had left the house, if at all. No longer interested in the heated and illogical dialogue exchange, I quickly ran downstairs, using extreme caution as I passed their open bedroom door, and quietly slipped out the garage door. I was relieved to find the large door open. I took Emily’s blue leash off the nail it was hanging on and opened the back door. Emily darted around the corner toward me. I reached out and grabbed her collar and clipped her leash on. As we hurried down the driveway, I decided it was best that we make a hard right down the street in order to avoid walking past the front window of the house on the off chance that the fight had gone mobile. When I reached the end of our cul-de-sac, I picked Emily up and guided her over the brick wall. I knew she would stand on the other side and wait for me. I scaled the wall myself and we found safety on the next street over. I sat against the brick wall and pulled Emily on to my lap. She licked my arms as I rubbed her stomach. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my iPod and unraveled the headphones. I sat there for the better part of the next hour listening to music and making a plan to stay gone as long as I could, hoping the fight would be over when I returned home.

My small Southern California town had boomed in recent years and there was no shortage of construction happening in my neighborhood. Emily and I had spent the afternoon walking through all the new houses looking for shiny nails I could use as a weapon should we be accosted by another dog before coming to a make-shift ravine which was no more than a large hole in the ground which has been filled with rain water. I sat down again, watching the sun set over the San Gorgonio mountains while Emily sat next to me. I placed my hand on her head which rested on my knee. I took my headphones out of my ears and flung them over my shoulders.

“What are we going to do, Sammy?” I asked rhetorically, calling her the nickname I had given her a few years before. She looked up at me before lying her head back down on my knee. When I was younger and not as attuned to the deeply rooted issues within their marriage which time would reveal, I actually thought I could save my parent’s marriage. I thought about the times I had called Dad at work and begged him to try harder to fix their marriage, not knowing he was trying harder than I realized, if not to fix things, at least maintain some semblance of normalcy until I was old enough to move out and go to college. I blamed him for the state of things in the house.

“If he could just listen and agree more,” I said to Emily, “...then none of this crap would be happening.” I had a long held tradition of siding with Mom in their fights, taking her word as gospel and using anything she said about him to discount his defenses. My sister, Mylissa, had moved out of state a few years before and did not talk to any of us after she left, again, something with which I disagree, but completely understand now. Other than Emily and friends at school, I was alone in the world. I sat on the bank of that ravine until it was dark outside, and guided only by the moon and streetlights, we made our way home.

“Where have you been?” Mom took a break from washing her car and asked as I walked up the driveway.

“Walking Sam.” I said, now walking into the garage to let Emily off her leash in the backyard.

“Well your dad left.” Mom said.

“Yeah.” I replied before walking into the house and upstairs to my room. I closed the door behind me, walked across the room and laid on my bed. I turned to look out the window toward the hill across town, atop of which stood a tall antenna tower with a flashing red light. I stared at the light for several minutes before rolling on my back and looked up at the ceiling where I had taped a picture of my high school girlfriend.

I lay in bed hoping mom would come upstairs and explain her side of things. I pictured her sitting at the foot of my bed telling me about how she knows things are rough right now, but telling me how much she still loved Dad. I imagined her apologizing on her and Dad’s behalf that I was scared and promise that they would take it easy in the future; that they wanted to show me that you can disagree with someone in a healthy way and that, though it may be a tough road, they were both committed to making things work.

I hoped dad would call me and tell me that I did not need to run and that we could take a different approach in the future. We could sit down as a family and talk through our problems and reach a mutually agreed upon solution to the issues in the house. I attempted to will-into-being a call which dad too would apologize for letting the fights get to the point where I felt, not only the desire to retreat, but the need.

She never came upstairs.

He never called.

—

I stood there listening to the rain and shaking her collar with my eyes closed for almost 10 minutes. I missed her, but I didn’t feel as though I could tell anyone. When fighting becomes the rule in a relationship rather than the exception, the children of the relationship always blame themselves. I was no exception. I took it hard that I could not help them. I had spent the last 4 years writing about love and giving relationship advice in my first blog, Coffee on Tuesday. I knew how to fix the problems in their relationship, I thought. The naivety of a child to think I had the answers to adult problems. Almost a decade of feeling I had to choose sides and sit in silence while my parents verbally bashed each other led to me thinking I could not, or should not, give my opinions about things. Maybe true, maybe not, but I learned to keep them to myself. Years had passed since Dad moved across town and Mom remarried.

My friends at school had been reduced to just one friend now that I had graduated. The picture on the ceiling had broken up with me the summer of junior year, an event which sent me into a full tailspin. The baseball team I loved was slowly approaching last place, and my one life-long friend had been put to sleep the weekend before. I had nowhere to turn.

-

There was a knock on the door. I walked downstairs and pressed my face to the peephole. It was our neighbor, Tiffany. I opened the door.

“Hey! Is your mom home?” She asked with a smile.

“She's still at school.” I replied. Mom started nursing school sometime during my sophomore year of high school. Tiffany had been a nurse for some years and often helped mom study. I assumed she just wanted to talk about some nursing thing, a subject which was way over my head at the time; a prelude to the grand cosmic joke that I would become a nurse myself about 7 years after my mom.

“I’m having a Halloween party next weekend. Tell your mom to call me when she gets home.” Tiffany said.

I have loved Halloween my entire life. Anyone in my family can tell you about the various haunted houses I built in any room of the house at any time of year when I was a kid. Visiting my dad on the weekends in the 90’s meant him climbing the rafters to retrieve boxes of Halloween decorations so I could work on a new, very spooky, haunted garage. My cousins, Nick and Adam, were always my scare-actors and dad was the sole patron. After many iterations of the haunted garage, I raised the bar ever higher. The result was a now infamous haunted bathroom at my Nana’s house, a story which is talked about every single Halloween in my family. The older I got, the more my skills advanced. Before long, I was creating full on haunted houses in our front yard and chasing kids with actual machetes and chainless chainsaws.

“I’ll tell her.” I said before closing the door. “Cool!” I thought. “I’ll ask Tiff if I can decorate.”

The night of the Halloween party arrived and, though I considered myself the true Pumpkin King, I was in that awkward phase of not wanting to dress up for Halloween because it’s what kids do, and wanting to completely lose myself in a character for one night only like I do now. I went to Tiff’s house about an hour before the party started to help transform her middle class, typical suburban house into a living nightmare. Once the guests started to arrive, the alcohol began to flow. It had been months since the picture on the ceiling had broken up with me, something which took years to recover from. I had continued to go to her church and even joined her church choir in the hopes of showing her what a dedicated guy I was and convince her to get back with me. Rule number one; never put more effort into anything than you’re getting back, especially if you’re a child attempting to win favor with another child, a rule you cannot fully conceptualize until you are an adult. A part of trying to win the picture back was making sure I was the most Christian Christian this side of Jerusalem. I thought that if I prayed hard enough and kept as close to the word as I could, God would reward me with giving me the picture back and I would be happy, and that I could control someone else’s actions in a relationship. Are you sensing a pattern? So when I was, inevitably, offered alcohol, I quickly said, “No thank you, I’m Christian.” Because, you know, Christians don’t drink and God gives them their girlfriends back.

As the night carried on, I realized I was the only sober one at the party. God is definitely going to reward me for this. As drunk adults often do when there is someone who is stone cold sober at a party, they dared me to have a beer. “No thank you, I’m Christian.” I replied again. “So am I.” replied one of the party guests, a mid 20s something ‘Hooters waitress’, Tiffany’s roommate. I glanced over at mom and my stepdad, Bill. They had also been enjoying the libations for hours and definitely wouldn't notice. “You’ve never drank before?” The waitress asked me. “I’ve had sips, but I’ve never had my own drink. I’m not 21.” I said reluctantly, hoping not to convince her that I wasn’t cool. “There’s no cops here.” She replied. There were, in fact, cops there, but I didn’t dare argue with a Hooters waitress. “I’ll try it.” I said. She walked over to the ice chest, took out a can, and handed it to me. “Bud Light?” I asked. “What do you want?” She asked in response. “This is fine.” I cracked it open. My hands shook, but I had to try to play it off like I wasn’t nervous. I slowly brought the can to my lips and took a large gulp. It tasted then how it tastes now, like absolute shit, but, again, Hooters waitress…

I quickly finished it and the waitress went and grabbed me another. I felt the cold burn of the beer in my chest as the waitress handed me the other one, already opened this time. “See how fast you can finish this one.” She challenged me. I tried my hardest to choke it down as quickly as I could. She took the empty can from my hand and placed it on the mantle of the fireplace. “Come dance with me.” She said before grabbing my hand and leading me to the front living room where Total Eclipse of the Heart by Nicki French was blasting on the stereo while party lights painted the walls in rhythm. The alcohol kicked in just as the waitress wrapped her hands around my neck and began moving her body on mine in time. “I heard you’re newly single!” She shouted over the music. Not the way I would have described it, but she was technically right. “Who broke up with who?” She asked. In a flash of genius, and having a thought only a drunk man can have, I fished for sympathy. “She broke up with me!” I yelled. She gave me a fake sad frown. “Take out your phone!” She yelled. I did as I was asked and handed it to her. She tucked her face into my neck and snapped a picture. “What’s her name?” She asked. I told her and she opened my contacts, found her, and sent her the picture. “Fuck her!” She yelled before reaching down and putting my phone back in my pocket. “Yeah!” I yelled. “Fuck her!” We danced for a few more songs after that before the party drew to a close. As the waitress said her goodbyes to the other party-goers, she reached me last.

“Can I spend the night with you?” I boldly asked, still swimming from the 2 beers I had 2 hours ago. She laughed and turned to walk away before stopping and asking over her shoulder,

“What kind of girl do you think I am?” And walked away before I answered what kind of girl I certainly hoped she was.

We walked back home and I was on an absolute high. I had gotten drunk for the first time and had a Hooters waitress grinding on me and sending pictures to me ex. “Shit!” I thought. “She sent her a picture of us dancing.” I could only hope my ex didn’t get the picture, that would completely set back all of the hard work God and I had been doing to bring her back in my life. If she had gotten the picture, she never mentioned it to me, and I never brought it up to her.

I thought about that feeling for weeks. I drank, I danced with a Hooters waitress, and I yelled, “Fuck her!” about the girl I was sacrificing almost every moment of my life trying to get back. I felt guilty for that last part, but it felt damn good in the moment. I had never felt like that before. What exactly was it about that night?

-

Weeks later, I was staying the night at a friend’s house when he went to his closet and brought out a bottle of Italian Liquor, and because I had already broken that barrier before, we drank the whole bottle. That feeling came back instantly. I felt like thee man. I no longer felt alone, depressed, scared, or sad. I just felt fearless, bulletproof, and unhurtable. I wanted that Halloween party feeling to last forever, and now I knew how. Alcohol.

Alcohol replaced Emily as my one true friend.

I was forever changed.

-Brendon