What was there to Alice. I loved her. She was my muse, my love, my everything. Even that doesn't quite explain her. She was my life. My life! There was nothing I wouldn't do for her, nothing I wouldn't endure.

That was before I saw the emails. Before I heard the waver in her voice.

I remember being at her sister's wedding. She invited me a month before and told me I just had to be there. It was nothing, of course I would be there. I bought the ticket in a second, without thought. She picked me up at the airport with a trepidation in her lips. Maybe she was just feeling out of sorts. She could have eaten something bad, she could just be feeling off, nervous, we hadn't seen each other for over a month.

Our first night was cold. Both of us were tired and we were glad to talk and go to sleep. But the next day, she told me to step aside when they were taking pictures. She treated me like that shitty handbag she threw in the back of the closet and only brought out for kick-around days when there was a possibility of rain. Maybe I had too much to drink or maybe I was just too drunk on the need to suck up to her family. After all, I was hoping to formally propose and let all of them know I wanted to marry their daughter. I embarrassed myself at her behest and made myself the butt of her family jokes.

But that night. I hoped the motto "weddings are a panty dropper" would hold true. God knew I had done everything I could to please her our relationship needed it and had needed it for months. But, alas, at the end of the night I cried myself to sleep. I could have put her in the friendzone then and there--as sophmoric as the concept was--but my love for her kept me going.

Then I got the call, less than two weeks later. I thought I kept myself fairly composed as I got into my car after work and she asked me why I was so cool. Work was terrible and made me question on a daily basis whether I had chosen the right profession or wasted thee last eight years of my life. So when she told me we should see other people I was well-equipped to handle it. Not break up, not take a break, but see other people.

I told her that I was driving and I could process it later.

That was it. That was it when we were sitting in a room a month later, when I was interviewing for jobs in my hometown to be with her, and we talked about all the men she fucked in my absence. We were oddly calm as I said that we were over and she agreed. Her email account told me everything. She knew the jig was up when I called her late at night crying. It was all about her new boyfriend, the man she fucked another man to get away from and me in turn. It just so happened that she fucked me long enough to actually talk about marriage. But marriage was just another word for escape. It clearly meant different things to us.

Shortly after, with my cock in her mouth at her behest, I thought about the fact that it was the fucking. She needed it and she didn't care about where it came from, even if it would jeopardize her relationship, family, romantic, or otherwise. But that wasn't really it. To an extent it was me, I could have friendzoned her and left her to her devices and made her truly happy while we were apart.

But I hoped to salvage things, to let her know how much I truly cared about her. I wanted to hang onto the past and see to it that things never changed. But everything always changes. Sometimes it changes in ways we don't appreciate or want at the time. There was no salvaging things. She needed a diversion. Even as I heard descriptions of someone fucking out her her more "non-traditional" piercings I thought I could salvage things. But things always change and we always need to adapt to that.

It was all a lie.

I should have turned to the friendzone. Maybe if I believed in that bullshit, made-up, juvenile concept, I could have made her pine for me as I moved on with my life, even when I thought we cared so much about each other. Certainly, I cared for her, that was totally unquestionable. Maybe if I had steeled myself against my love for her and let her know I didn't care for her--that she was just an object to me--that I could teach her a lesson and make her want me. It wouldn't be true, but how amazing would it have been if I could inflict on her the pain she inflicted on me. How much better would I feel about myself if I ignored my shortcomings in our relationship and entirely blamed everything on her?

But really, it was all a lie.

I'm pissed and pissed, as it were, but it always, always gets better if you want it to. Just saying.