You Broke My Heart 'Cuz I Couldn't Dance

Since I obviously can't say goodbye to blogger, (I brandished an axe and sliced down the Bodhi tree, had to pulp it for paper) here's an all too sweet and sentimentally saccharine fartheewell's dusted off from the archives of Little David's ever wandering escapades with the opposite sex; that elusive beatific eyed immortal Queen reigning over my keyboard prancing fingertips--the female genus. This angels name is Kristina. It's an ugly entry because it deals with my sins and with a person that I hurt. Feel free to skip this putrid slice of nostalgia and mull over Daniela's all-too vexing riddle, instead.

Ahhhh.....nothing like a shot of life to give you a little something to learn from.

*

We broke up over the phone. It was one of those long gravid pauses where you feel obliged to comment and to realistically examine the situtation and yet, for some inexplicable reason the 'dumper' and the 'dumpee' feel compelled to instigate a quiet contest instead, blathering back and forth late-teenage drivel such as, "Yeah, honey. I've been feeling that way too."

Kristina was coy and quiet and with moist lavender eyes and a Book of Ruth biblical modesty about her. She played trumpet in Marching Eagles and she even called me (collect) from Paris that summer. After we broke up she spontaneously appeared on my doorsteps a week later (My Mom of course, was 'thrilled' to see her) . It was an ugly goodbye. When I embraced her for one final time, "For nostalgia's sake, honey." Her limbs just sort of drooped and hung listlessly on the side of her body; as if her joints were connected to the collar of a noose rather than fastened into warm sockets of flesh. Nothing is quite so hollow as an unrequited hug.

"I had an appointement in the area and thought I'd stop by."

She handed me back the ring my grandmother had given me for confirmation five years earlier. The ring my mother warned, "Was not to go on the finger of some girl."

Kristina handled herself with the delft aura and timeless grace historically reserved for silent film stars. She cupped the ring like a dibbled nugget in her palm and planted it into the soil of my hands without saying a word in recompense. When I told her I was sorry for my philandering's her lips remained reticent; a still life hyphen. I couldn't even get her chin to wobble out a nod.

"I'd also like my story back." Kristina asked. She had written a story. She was heavily into Jane Austen.

"Alright," I said. "Let me look for it."

I propped open my closet and fished through bushels of stacked manuscripts. Kristina stood up, erect, in perfect parrellel posture; like a flag pole lamenting at half-mast. She didn't drum her fingertips along my bookshelves itching for a spine to grope. She didn't recline on my bed. She didn't look at the framed photograph I had of us from her "prom" three months earlier, the photograph where Kristina wore the impeccable burgundy dress that hugged her thighs; the photograph where her forehead glistened as if it was just watered by a campus sprinkler, the photograph where I stood behind her, my arms buckled around her waist, as if I was holding on to her for something that I needed; buoyed to her polite grace, but afraid to sink like an anchor in the pond of seasonal solitude.

"Every girl wants to have a prom picture like that." My youngest sister Jenny said.

"Here," I said to Kristina, handing her her manuscript back, a dried bouquet of inky images, far better than anything I had ever written.

Kristina turned around without saying a word. I shouted out her name I asked that maybe we could perhaps talk. I chided her for stopping by withoug calling first. She was silent. As she clacked don the apartment steps she turned around.

"I had an appointemnt in thre area." She said, again slipping into her vehicle and grilling the gas for effect as she sped out of my driveway.

"What appointment? You don't even work." I yelled out, watching her windhsield reflecting against the sun glaze and vanish. A week later I would realize that her "appointment" was a date with my best friend, Patrick, who always talks like a surfer.

"Dude, man. She's hot. Good thing I tried to reel her in since you had trouble grasping the pole."

Patrick smiles. I smile. Kristina met Patrick just that once for coffee and then gradually dissipated. Never to be heard from again until she got married last June.

"You should have stayed with Kristina," My dad said, that Thanksgiving, when I was drunk.

"Why," I told him. "What the hell was I going to do, marry her?"

"She was faithful to you," Father retorted, helping his only son into the passengers seat. Snatching the heavy jangle of car keys away from his son's biting grasp.