April's Heart

Air, Space and Perspective

April Thomas poured the last of the wine from the bottle into her glass and stared down into it as if it held the answers to all life's mysteries.  She was celebrating one year of being single.  Celebrating because drinking alone would have been more of a cry for help.  Drinking with friends is fun, at least that's what she had told herself when she invited everyone.  Her friends, however, had left hours ago but she was still drinking.  Celebrating the day Kenny left her.  Kenny with his perfect teeth and strong hands.  Articulate, funny, successful Kenny.  Who needs him?

"Not me!" April shouted, her desperate voice echoing through her empty apartment.  She was trying to convince no one but herself and she didn't even believe her.

For ten months she they lived together and she was convinced she had found her happily ever after.  He rushed home to be with her every night.  He called and texted from work every day.  She didn't know how she had gotten so lucky.  Then one day the texts stopped.  He had left for work before she awoke, as always but that night he didn't come home.  In a panic, April called all of his friends, sure he was in the hospital unable to use his thumbs to let her know.  

Unfortunately, April discovered in the morning that Kenny hadn't suffered a traumatic thumb injury at all.  When she was able to reach John, his one sympathetic friend, he informed her that Kenny had been in contact with one of his many ex-girlfriends.  The  kind of girls who appear when they smell money.  John didn't tell her which one it was but it didn't matter because they were all the same.  They knew that daddy was rich  so they too would someday be rich.  Kenny had always taken pride in walking away from those sorts of women  and finding someone with what he liked to call "substance".  But in the end glitz, glamor and copious amounts of plastic surgery beat out her substance so when given an ultimatum, he without hesitation (a detail John could have left out) chose the ex. 

Substance:0
Satan:1

John came over a week later to collect Kenny's suits and other things he left behind.  April had considered burning them like so many jilted lovers in the movies she loved or giving them to the Salvation Army. But instead she folded everything lovingly and placed it in a box she labeled "cheating asshole". 

John laughed when he saw it and promised he would let her know how Kenny reacted. He seemed sincere and she genuinely expected him to call, but once she closed the door behind him and watched him carry the box to his car she never saw or heard from him again.

Everything they shared, all the friends she thought she had made disappeared when Kenny did.  He took with him not only his presence and a love the likes of which she'd never known, he took her social life.  She worked  and ate and she only worked  so she could eat and vice versa.  She went from nights on the town to tubs of ice cream in her pajamas on a Tuesday afternoon.  It was a sad state of  affairs.

That was a year ago.  As time went on, she got better.  She could keep ice cream in the freezer for a whole two days before scarfing it down in a moment of weakness. She couldn't help but wonder though, as her sadness waned, how Kenny could  go from loving her one minute, to not loving her the next.  Had it all been a lie?  He had walked out of her life so easily that she was sure there was something about her that made her impossible to really love.  She spent endless nights going over their last few months in her mind wondering what it was that had pushed him away from her and into the arms of Crystal or Candy or Becky or Bunny.  It  seemed he was desperate to find the exact opposite of her.  Where she had substance he wanted none.  Were she was intelligent he wanted vapid.  Where she was warm and loving he wanted cold and demanding. If that's what he wants, she thought, then good riddance.