Spring Day

fourteen

chapter fourteen ~ the one with the breakup
Heather's POV

Carl didn't seem to want to get married. He didn't even seem to want to talk to me anymore, the only time that I saw him was if I accidentally woke up in the middle of the night and he was asleep on the bed next to me. He stayed in work all day and told me over the phone that he had to work extra hours but it just made me wonder how much truth was to his story. I had believed him for months but now I wasn't buying it because it didn't seem like he was being honest with me. The worst part about this was that I was left to plan my wedding on my own and at this point, I didn't even feel like I was getting married. I didn't want to get married because I was so miserable and my friends could see how bored of this I was getting. Why couldn't Carl love me the way that he used to and want to spend time with me and want to marry me? Why did he have the ring if he wasn't going to propose to me? It didn't make any sense and just made me feel more miserable than ever before.

What made things even worse was that it was now Valentine's Day and Carl told me that he was working all day. I didn't mind if he worked a few hours but I wanted to do something nice on this holiday like we usually did and now he was cancelling our plans. Ever since we started dating, on Valentine's Day we would go out for the day and just enjoy spending time together but now that he had cancelled on our tradition, I was left feeling more pathetic than ever before and I hated it. This day is only supposed to be miserable for single people, not miserable for the people in relationships and certainly not miserable for the people that are supposed to be planning a wedding to the love of their life. No matter how many times I tried to convince myself that I was excited for the wedding, I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm to plan things and even my friends were noticing how lifeless I had become over the past few weeks.

Carl had double checked with me a hundred times, asking where I was going for the evening because he wanted to make sure that I wasn't alone on this special holiday. Some people would find that cute, that he was looking out for me but I wasn't happy about it; if you didn't want me to be alone then why did you decide to work all day? I told him what my plan was, the girls invited me to Monica and Rachel's apartment where they were having a sleepover to celebrate the holiday as singles. And seeing as my fiancé made plans for himself in work, I had nothing better to do and accepted the invite. Carl was keen on knowing that I would be out of our apartment all night, which made me wonder if he was going to do something special when I got home, to make up for all the times that he had been working late. But I didn't get too ahead of myself because I didn't want to get upset if nothing was there when I got home.

For some reason, the girls came up with the idea of an ex-boyfriend ritual and decided that they were going to burn things that belonged to their exes as a way of getting luck for the next person that they meet. Everyone was gathering things that belonged to their exes while Phoebe prepared what we needed for the ritual to begin; somehow, she had found one online and we could use it for our own luck when it came to relationships. Only when I noticed Rachel and Monica getting things from their bedrooms did I realise that I didn't have anything on me to put into the fire and remembered that I had a movie ticket from one of my first dates ever, when I was in High School. I had kept it because it was the first movie, I had gone to see without my parents around and that was a big accomplishment for me. But weirdly, it was also the first date that I had ever been on and it was with my first boyfriend, Bradley Fisher.