Beautiful Little Black Book

The day I put his phone number away was one of the most punishing experiences I have ever enacted. I steadied my hand, and swallowed my breath as I tried to forget at all that there was a beating heart fighting my every motion in my chest. I had to do it. I had to erase him from my contacts; erase his familiar number--the number that used to soothe my restless soul, the number that used to bring a fiery glow to my cheeks. The number simply had to go. It was now pain, and danger. It would now test all my impulse control. The number would taunt me. It would remind me of his gentle, and ferocious love. The number simply had to go.

I couldn't erase him completely. I couldn't erase the betrayal. I could never erase the cruelty. I couldn't erase how he mockingly told me that " I wore my beauty like a halo", speaking to my perceived sanctimony. If only he knew how bruised my beauty felt these days. I guess I also couldn't quite erase the hope. The hope that he would lick the drinking, he would stop the cheating, and that he would return to himself.

So, I wrote his number in the beautiful, little, black book where I kept all my secrets, my hopes, and everything that was sacrosanct to me. I put the book back in the bottom of my hope chest that I received when I was a teenager with the rest of my wishes. I didn't pull that beautiful, little, black book out until two years later.

Two years later he was engaged to the girl he had been cheating on me with. I found out about the engagement the day I went to retrieve the book. I opened the book, and began scrolling through it. I thought about calling him, and congratulating him for a second, but I stopped myself. It wouldn't have been genuine. I wasn't happy for him. There wasn't a modicum of my being that was happy for him. I didn't want him anymore, but I surely didn't think he deserved such explicit joy after sprinkling suck divine insincerity, and devastating false hope into my world. I think it's okay to not always be the absolute bigger person all the time in every situation.

I continued on through the book, and found the eulogy I had written for my best friends funeral many, many years before. This had been my most sincere best friend. My best friend had been my grandmother. She was a small woman all of about five foot one. However, she contained a furious amount of stoic love in her little body. I was destroyed when she died. No loss of romantic love could ever compare to the void of losing that woman. In a word she was...MAGIC.

My grandmother wrote me a letter before she died, but I couldn't bare to read it. She wasn't the mushy sort. Her love radiated in her every action, in every ounce of her being. I hadn't been prepared to read sugared words from this stalwart. So, I stashed the letter away in the beautiful, little, black book, and forgot all about it. I decided that day it was time to hear from my grandmother as I stumbled across the letter.

I ran my finger across her handwriting on the letter spelling out my name in cursive letters...there it was my every happiness. All lives delights came rushing back to me in that handwriting. I saw Christmas paper, birthday candles, coming home after a long trip--all there in those beautiful curled letters that were so familiar, yet had been so achingly missed. I wanted to wrap myself up in the loops of her pen strokes.

I opened the envelope prepared to be washed over by emotional text. A check fell to the floor, and there was a note in the envelope. I cautiously picked the check up from the floor. The check was for twenty-thousand dollars. The note enclosed simply read " For my granddaughter 'go far, be free, do what you want with this money, I will always love you, and always be proud of you'. Within that black book, and within that sum of money I was shown the depths of just how complicated, and messy love can be, and the again its purity, and in fact just how simple.

- THE END