While sitting in the mechanic’s empty waiting room/office as my car was getting its screeching brakes replaced, I rifled thru my purse looking for a bar napkin on which I had written the recipe for a Sexy Alligator. I pulled out a wad of square bar napkins, folded collectively in half, from the front pocket of my purse. In the first instant, I recognized them as doodles and notes my ex had drawn and passed to me when we were at a bar with his friends after the first time we’d broken up and were talking about how to work things out. On four napkins he’d written “I miss u”; doodled a few heart balloons with happy faces in them; written a fancy “Pookie2”; drawn a sad face with an arrow going thru it with a broken heart underneath; written the message “I’d rather sit in silence with you, than listen to all the noise with them.” In the next instant, I placed the timeline together that he’d drawn these the night before he and “the boys” went to Vegas in September, 2004, and mere days from the creation of these declarations of love for me, he would be in Vegas, meeting up with his student that he carried on an entire relationship with behind my back (whom he’d sworn up and down throughout the relationship that he was in zero contact with, and then when I found out differently, he yelled at me that “on principle” he can talk to whomever he wants and it’s none of my business since he’s not doing anything wrong), and they would make out in Vegas and she would perform oral sex on him in his car in the parking structure of a Vegas hotel, even as I sat at home and believed his words, sobbed to me through uncountable phone calls that weekend, redeclaring his love for me and his desire to leave Vegas early so that he could come home and be with me.

Less than ten seconds after unfolding these napkins that I used to treasure, I crumbled in tears. I only found out this May that the girl was in Vegas with them on that trip. Knowing what I know now about his betrayals in the relationship, so many treasures and happy memories are now tainted and rancid with the stench of decay and lies. I guess I’m not over it yet.