Sitting in front of a bowl of steaming ramen, I’d never felt more alone. While the workers in the kitchen moved back and forth in an orchestrated symphony, the dining room was empty, except for me. I subconsciously picked the middle seat against the wall. The light from the street punched through the shaded glass, highlighting me and displaying how lonesome I was. Every slurp was accented by no other small noises; every chew was a small bomb for one – me.
Pulling the noodles from their spicy orange broth, the chashu pork floated past. There was no one to tell how perfect the ajitama egg was, that this pepper-infused elixir was giving me a second chance at life after a long night swallowing poison due to my girlfriend and I calling it quits. But one of us not wanting to call it quits. (me.)
I’ve gotten used to being alone but losing your significant other; your best friend, stings worse than losing a kiss when the lights are out. There is a fundamental difference between losing a girlfriend and losing your Best Friend. These two things are not the same. You can love someone, but it requires different skills to like them as a person and to see your best self as a byproduct of their influence. Laughter sounds different when you miss the timbre of a specific set of pipes, just as a meal feels sad when all you want to do is talk about how great it is with the ghost in your heart. I often wonder if somewhere deep within my subconscious if I’d made a deal with the proverbial devil, or through my life experiences within karma, I’m paying for something I did in a past life. Darkness and me, we’re old pals. I love the night when everyone is asleep, when the cars drive just a little faster, hoping a cop doesn’t see them. I live for sad songs and can relate to a lonesome cowboy, a sunny day with the windows down just ain’t my jam.
There is communion in eating alone. The world is consistently busy, and I have no problem throwing on my AirPods or breaking open a book while I wait for someone to bring me my fish tacos on any other day, but for this moment, my heartbreak was perceptible with every lazy noodle hanging from the chopsticks. I’ve lost girlfriends before. I lost a wife. Losing this one felt like a stab wound that someone kept ladling that fiery concoction into, making me relive the ache with the smallest reminders like an inside joke, a good meme, or a song that absolutely crushes me through her memory. Rooms are quieter without her presence, and the aisles of the grocery store can haunt you because it’s a hard habit to break when you’re looking at the drinks she likes in that special healthy section, knowing that her painted fingernails potentially slid across those bottles as she made a choice of which one to pick, as she did me, if only for just a little while.
Those intrusive thoughts are what can break a person.
I’ve gotten good at that place of quiet introspection, where heartbreak lives and my place in the world, trying to grab a moment like a fistful of sand. I expect more as I get older, but what does the world give you? Probably less. I dropped the chopsticks into an empty bowl, grabbed my bag, and headed for the door. Another ghost of influence following me, unlike the one in my heart, this one reminds me of the mistakes that lead to a lonely meal.
I collect ghosts. In Buddhism and throughout Asian culture, there’s something called The Hungry Ghost – the eternal specter constantly searching for satiation, that for all their sins while alive, they’re doomed to constantly seek nourishment, to seek food, drink, lust, whatever their spiritual crimes on earth were, they will search into the afterlife for these moments, still.
The ghost of my girlfriend is omnipresent. There’s sad and sitting in an empty pool hall crying over a Lone Star sad. The pool hall was massive, and no one was breaking balls, no one was pool sharking, there was just a lone bartender washing her bottles, pretending I wasn’t there as I wiped the tears out of my eyes, begging through text messages to talk in person. The loss of love hurts, especially when that person’s name lives in your bone marrow. I’ve been drinking a lot because I can’t cope with the silence of my phone not going off, excited to chat about nothing or to tell her that she was the love of my life for the fifteenth time that day. Instead, I’m cursed with silence, and she probably even blocked my number, tired of hearing me beg for her time. The past surrounds me. Our mistakes can engulf us, but with the right hands, problems can be fixed with a little super glue and love, maybe some sage since we’re talking about the specters of the dead.
Dating is hard. Love is hard. There’s an agreement that there are no secrets, but there always are and sometimes, there is no forgiving for sins of the past. You can open the internal casket and give someone your secrets and as painful as they are to let them out from your skeleton, it’s not up to you how that person processes the information. I gave her all of mine.
Out there in the world, there is unknown and beautiful; there is what we lose in ourselves with every mistake. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but losing the one person you love the most in the world feels worse with every swallow of Jameson or every Benadryl I pop so I can sleep away the pain radiating inside. I can scribble away her memory, and I can’t black out every day for the rest of my life; I have to simply accept my failure as mine. I loved so hard that when she entered the room my body was engulfed in flames. That when she whispered in my ear, that’s the closest to what I think a snake charmer feels in a revival tent. The loss hasn’t gotten easier, if anything the mourning has gotten worse. I wanted to marry her but now have to settle for photos on my phone. Hard luck lives.
Times are tough right now. I don’t want to keep anything as a road map of my life. There is a tomorrow as I don’t want to experience it many times. I carry her ghost with me. There will be other bowls of ramen. There will be silent moments of her memory. I’ll probably see her out two-stepping with some other man, knowing that my poor choices led to her whispering into someone else’s ear that it’s time to get a drink at the bar and I’ll be silently humming The Dixie Chicks, “tonight, the heartache is on me.” Her ghost will be next to me, never letting me forget she’s forever in my bones.
Robert Dean is a working class writer, raconteur, and enlightened dumbass. You can read his work in places like Austin American-Statesman, MIC, Fatherly, and Consequence of Sound. His first collection of poems, Snakes in the Garden is dropping this fall from Madness Heart Press.
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