Read Part Two here.

I ended up meeting a girl. K was a blonde with short hair and big brown eyes. One of those eyes, the left one, had a mind of its own. Behind my back, my friends called her “Tangle Eye,” but I thought the quirk was beautiful. She also had a birthmark near the corner of her mouth. Quick to smile and mischievous but strangely shy at times. I first met her at a party where she was outside swinging a gun around, then at another party where the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Tearjerker” from the album One Hot Minute was playing. It seemed like kismet. She wore a short brown dress and I watched her walk around through the crowd and the smoke holding a red keg cup of beer.

She drove an old battered blue VW golf, a two door to accent my gold battered four door. We were all out in the hills of Vermont at yet another party one night and I ended up in the car with her as she sped along through twisting dirt roads at top speed laughing while the car bounced around and I held the oh shit handle in a death grip. She went through the gears like a pro, downshifting into turns and spinning the wheels. We ended up alone, in the night, just talking. She told me her parents were going away, invited me up, and said she would cook me dinner. Sounded good.

Meanwhile, all the summer partying took its toll on my early mornings at the Commons. My work mirrored the amount of sleep I got each night, which was very little. K and I partied it up into the wee hours and then I would sneak her into my parent’s place, making sure to bring her shoes upstairs so my parents wouldn’t see or I’d stay at her pad. Either way I’d wake up bleary eyed and have to drag my ass in to work late. Go and set up the rotisserie chickens, and talk to Chef Robert about my poor performance. I could tell he had lost faith in me, but I didn’t care, there was no way out of the schedule.

I didn’t want to let him down. I tried my best, but when an opportunity to work nights came, I took it. An ad in the paper for the best Italian place in town, the Trattoria Delia. I went in there after work one day in my chef’s whites and spoke to the chef/owner, Tom, an Italian Dude with a thick, black mustache. He liked me and gave me the job on the spot. The next day I put in my two weeks notice with Chef Robert. Hungover and drained from another late night, I sat in the office and gave him the news, stoic as usual, he nodded and wished me luck. It was surreal and felt like I was watching the whole scene like a fly on the wall.

Two weeks later I was back in Italian mode. This place, however, did its damndest to be authentic which to me was the coolest thing in the world. I had only known Italian food as red sauce and pasta. Tom educated me about the regions of the country and knew a lot about wine. He also worked on the line with us five days a week which to me was ultra cool and badass.

That summer there seemed to be a party every single night. A shindig at someone’s parent’s house or a bonfire type blaster out in a field somewhere. Somehow, through all of this debauchery, I maintained my comic art and I ended up getting into the Kubert School and travelling down to Dover, New Jersey to check it out but I ended up not going because I couldn’t imagine life without K. When she told me she was pregnant an atom bomb went off in my stomach.

“I’ll support you with whatever you want,” I said.

“I want an abortion.”

“Ok.”

She didn’t want me to go to the clinic with her. She brought her mom and her sister instead. Afterwards, she found a subletter for her apartment and moved back home, up in the Lake Champlain Islands. We saw each other less and less. We spoke on the phone every day and I would go to her job at the health food store to see her but a great distance too far to traverse had materialized. When she told me she needed a break from our relationship, I gave her the remainder of the space she needed.

I bought a dozen roses one day before work, then after my shift went out and got ripping, roaring drunk with my friends. Instead of going home after last call, I made the drive up to the Islands in the rain, to her parent’s house, and put the roses on the doorstep under the eaves. I stood there in the rain smoking a cigarette, and when I finished, I took the butt and wedged into the door handle of her blue Golf.

K and I stayed in touch for a little while, even went cross country skiing one day and made passionate love afterwards, our cheeks still blazing red from the cold. I still visited her at the hippie health food store from time to time to see her, but the time between our phone conversations grew. In our last conversation, she told me she was moving to Santa Cruz, California in a week.

And that was it.

Breaking up is almost the same as the death of a loved one or friend, but this one in particular hurt for a long time. I began to think of life as a series of roads where one could veer one way and begin a journey completely opposite from the other. As the months went on, and K was on the other side of the country, I still thought about what could have been and what I could have done to make it better. A mixture of relief and regret rolled into one.