Venus, and let you leave. But while I worry about you falling even more under the influence of Nina Sylvester, her followers, and their questionable sexual practices and beliefs, I also must admit that some part of me fears abandonment, if only by my underemployed ex-boyfriend.
Everett, I can’t retract any “judgmental” statements I may have made about your new sex cult, but if in truth it’s my complaints about your presence here that have driven you to decide to leave, I want you to know you are more than welcome to stay.
Sincerely,
Roxy
July 22, 2012
Dear Everett,
O woeful, woeful, woeful day! Yesterday after you declared that you are indeed moving out soon and left (to go… where? To the OM house to check out your new room, which is certainly dripping with hazmat? To an OM meeting to forget about our argument and lose yourself in clit “stroking”?), I tried to distract myself with that mindless stuffer, Facebook. What I saw was so unexpected and awful that it’s sent me into a total tailspin.
You know months ago I heard through the Austin rumor mill that Brant Bitterbrush and Cold Connie Caldwell got married. I had accepted that fact (though I did go on a social media fast to avoid any photographic evidence of their happiness together). But today when I got on Facebook for the first time in ages I saw on Brant Bitterbrush’s mother’s page a photo (knife through my heart!) of Connie and Brant Bitterbrush’s newborn IDENTICAL TRIPLETS! The horror! The horror!
They are Brant’s spitting image. My heart has broken all over again. (While part of me is outraged no mutual acquaintance told me of Cold Connie’s pregnancy, part of me is glad to have found out in the privacy of my own home!)
For the last hour I’ve been on a sad journey down memory lane—all the way back to when I was nineteen and Brant Bitterbrush and I worked together as lifeguards at Barton Springs for a seemingly endless summer just after I returned to Austin after my gap year travels. Back in those days, when Brant and I tried to pretend we weren’t falling in love, Connie Caldwell was just an uptight, annoying coworker famous among us for pulling out her calculator at restaurants so she could calculate what everyone at the table owed down to the penny. A total dud, she once said to me—and I quote—“I don’t like women.” (I can’t believe that on not one, but two separate occasions, Brant got together with Connie after he and I broke up! But I jump ahead in my melancholy tale.)
I can still replay the memory of our first magical night together—I see it in my mind like a film in HD. Brant and I climbed up onto the Barton Springs office roof, still warm from the sun. The glow of the full moon caused the water below us to sparkle, creating the perfect conditions for a romantic first tryst. And yes, Venus was out in the night sky. It was practically written in the stars that Brant and I would fuck for the first time on that fateful night, under her light.
From then on Brant and I were tangled together like puppies. But our love was eventually marred by his overindulgence in alcohol and meat products—we bickered about the little things, like his Sunday morning bacon-frying fests and my tendency to be “slightly messy.” But the real problem was that Brant wanted to have children. Not someday, but soon, like before we were even thirty, which seemed absolutely insane. (“Twenty-seven is as old as Kurt Cobain ever got,” he’d say. To which I’d reply: “That’s no reason to have a baby!”) But he swore he wanted to be a young dad. Also, he’d developed an apathy toward me that spoke of a great discontent—when I came over he’d often turn on the television instead of listening to me recount the details of my day. (Everett, you know I can tolerate almost anything except (1) the idea of procreating, and (2) being ignored.) Of course, once I broke up with Brant he realized I was the sun his world revolved around, but it was too late. We tried to remain friends, but anytime we saw each other we both wept. I remember how sad I was to find myself single on my half birthday when I was twenty-three. (I felt so old to be alone, which makes me chuckle darkly now.)
Once I was totally over Brant (so I