Homewrecker

I pulled up outside an apartment building with cigarette packets scattering the lawn like stars in the sky. I am waiting for the boy who cheated on my best friend. He is scrambling to pick up his things, just as he scrambled for excuses, and when he couldn’t find one, pulled the suicide card from his pocket. I am filling out the request of my best friend: drive him home; make sure to let his mom know he’s not in a mentally safe place. He finally flings open a torn screen door and comes out, his backpack half open and spilling papers painted red with his smaller mistakes. He gets in. We both say nothing the entire drive to his trailer house, but parked outside the doorway, he cries to me. He admits his idiocrasy plainly. He says he lost what was too good to be his. I am stuck between solidarity and anger for my best friend, and sympathy for a sinner. I don’t care much for religion, but of the commandments, “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was not one I had problems with. 

My stomach is queasy from the blended mixture of love, excitement, tenderness, and regret. I have never let regret sit in my stomach before. I decide I must address it. I am clothed only by my bedspread, my head resting on his chest, staying grounded only by the repetition of his heartbeat. There is a morning glow peeking from gaps in my blinds. I must throw a baseball through this stain-glass moment and ask about this man’s girlfriend. 

I have struggled with labels before. Anxiety disorder, annoying, anorexic. Now I struggle with this one: Homewrecker. 

They have taken their Christmas presents off the shelf from our childhood friend and are digging in the upright cabinet for a lighter. They think we are reading the same book, only they are a few pages ahead. I say we are not the same book. I say we took opposite forks of a road. They find a lighter in the kitchen, pull me down the stairs and set a hand-crafted Christmas ornament of The Nightmare Before Christmas in a pothole in the driveway. The ornament’s figures look hand crafted with clay and painted with thin brush. The ground the characters is on is hot glue and moss.The characters are hugging, safe in their snow-globe dome. They set fire to Jack Skellington, laughing, sharing a high five. I am a third wheel to their chaos. They give me a shouldered hug and tell me that I’m better without them in my life. They are at a point of resentment I won’t ever feel towards a person who took seven hours to make us each a hand-crafted ornament. I now think I have a better understanding of how my best friend felt when she went through her breakup. I want to take back the jokes I made about the man that cheated on her and save them for tomorrow. I only lost a close friend, and I still feel this defensive of a voice I will never hear again. 

I am tasting the word in my mouth. It is sour. I do not like it, yet I am saying it over and over again, tasting it as punishment. It reminds me of self-harm, but it does not match the psychology of self-harming, which is to cause harm in order to “provide a distraction from painful emotions by causing physical pain” or “feel a sense of control.” The therapist I am seeing says I should stop calling myself a homewrecker so much. She says it a strong word. It is still weaker than the pain I imagine for the loss of the relationship I played a role in. 

Grading myself according to the ten commandments: 

1. 1. 13% 

“Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” 

1.     A. I used to believe in God but I am not sure if I do anymore. I do believe in heaven,though, I think. But even when I did believe, I would have chosen so many people over God if they were both hanging from a cliff side, and I could only save one. 

1. 2. 8% 

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” 

1.     A. I used to pray in apology for this and attempted to stop for a while, but I presently commit 

this daily. 

1. 3. 0% 

“Remember to keep holy the sabbath day.” 

1. 1.     A. I have not been to church since I left for college. I am usually scheduled for work onSunday mornings. 

1. 4. 30% 

“Honor your mother and your father.” 

1.     A. I only honor my father, and not very well. I have refused to call my mother anything buther legal first name for roughly seven months. I have said it is because she does not deserve the title of someone who is supposed to be caring and loving. 

2. 5. 100% 

“You shall not kill.”
My bonus question for a quiz I am failing. 

1. 6. 97% 

“You shall not commit adultery” 

1.     A. I have never cheated, but I would be lying if I said that it had never crossed my mind atthe coattails of the relationship. I did not act, but even a silent thought, only shared with Christ, is sin. 

7)
“You shall not steal” 

8) 36%
“You shall not bear false witness”
I like to think I am kind, but a truly kind person does not gossip as much as I do. 

9)
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife”
10)%
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.”
I produce for myself, and am proud of my life and my possessions. But jealousy is one of the deadly seven, as they say. 

I leave numbers seven and nine blank. 

The woman I homewrecked comes into the restaurant I am eating at. I am shaking and when I get up to walk to the restroom; my legs nearly buckle beneath me. It has been roughly a year. I am not sure if she even knows what I have done to her. Yet, I imagine her spitting on my face. I am both terrified and so, so sorry. 

I think of my high school friend, whose boyfriend has cheated on her three times, to her knowledge. That friend is pregnant with his baby. I wonder what number will be too many times? I wonder if there ever will be too many times? Last time he cheated on her with a minor. I think he should be in jail. Behind that friend’s back in the school cafeteria, we are reaching over blue trays of chicken nuggets and potato wedges to ask, what if the child is a girl? Do we trust him not to rape his own daughter? 

The woman who homewrecked my best friend wasn’t aware of what she had been doing. I was. I wonder what the word must taste like to her. 

My therapist suggests I try writing poetry as a form of art therapy. I write a poem and title it A Homewrecker’s Nesting: 

“A bird built its nest in the ribcage of last season’s doe. 

Blue shells pierced, peeled away like bricks from a wall; life in the heart of death. 

The bones, grand architecture, mimicking large quartz columns arched like the spine 

in my lover’s back when he’s sitting on the edge of our bed and reaches for something he 

dropped on the floor. The birds may never have to wonder why flowers wilt, but they will never have the pleasure of a lover resting their head 

on their laps. The birds will never understand the slowing of the 

doe’s heart, each final beat a key lower on a piano. Just as they will never 

understand the woman whose heart I bit into like an apple. How they’ll 

never understand the heart my home put out, too.” 

A classmate in my college course brings up the concept that Christianity claims all sins are equal. She explains that obviously, that’s not true though. She compares murder to stealing a pack of gum. I wonder where homewrecking falls on the scale. 

I am making beaded bracelets with a friend on my living room floor. We have poured out a bag of wooden letter beads into the shag carpet and are sifting through them for another “e.” We have a small bowl on the coffee table filled with colorful matt orbs to slide on between letters. We’re both giggling at our “choke me” chokers. I have made a bracelet that says “college whoopsie.” I wasn’t exactly planned, after all. I don’t think pink and green beads could make “homewrecker” look cute the way they make “cum dumpster” hysterical. 

I am helping my best friend move into a new apartment. She introduces me to her college best friend. I am glad she has found another person. We click decently well. He is tall, teasing my best friend for her height as we stack plastic cups in the brown cupboards of her new studio. He looks out the window at her new view and calls a girl he sees on the sidewalk below cute. The girl laces her fingers in the hands of the man she is walking with. He pulls his eyes from the window and says he can cross her off his list of potential girlfriends. My best friend makes a joke about how that wouldn’t stop me. I have only confessed the sin of homewrecking to four people: three close friends, and God. A fifth now knows, and he tells me I am shitty, straight to my face. I agree with him. I would like to be done there, but he spends the next couple minutes elaborating on how shitty I am. My best friend only cuts him off after I have made the decision to tell the two of them I need to hit the road for home before it gets dark. I leave and have a panic attack in the car. My lips tingle. It is so violent I lose all feeling in my hands and my vision goes black. I am driving blindly. I conclude: this is how I die. 

I try writing another poem. I title this one, A root’s journey: 

“If every plant holds a spirit in its stem that oozes like sap, what thinks the spirit as it slips down my throat, steaming, mixed with honey? Does the turmeric’s soul despise my own and grant me only flavor as gifts? Or is tea a tremendous honor, healing those wounded from the inside out? 

Can the root sit crisscross 

across from my aura and see
my sins scrawled out on a scroll? Can it
see my deep-rooted guilt that causes
the ruptures on my skin’s surface?
Will the root wrap
around my heart and heal or strangle me? Will it wreck my lungs the way I wrecked that relationship by sleeping with that man, whose heart did not belong in my hand? 

Or will the root tell me that after two years of nightmares, I can’t re-write my wrongs?” 

After running into the woman I homewrecked at the restaurant, my roommate tells me I need to move on. That I made a mistake, I have regretted it, I have learned, and I cannot change the past. He tells me I still need to process what I have done. I have been processing for a year. I picked up prayer again just to beg for forgiveness. Still, I am begging for mercy. 

One of my friends suggests honesty with the issue is how I will heal. He suggests that owning up to it is better than scrambling to keep it hidden. I write in my journal. The first person I should tell is myself. It has been two years, but I think it is time I take the first step.