He loves me, He loves me not

Let me move this box out of the way. I will get back to it. First, let me tell you what happened.

What do you do when someone breaks your heart? Do you scream and cry? Gain 15 pounds on a grief induced self-pity trip involving every flavor of Ben and Jerry’s while inhaling the scent from an abandoned hoody? Do you pretend it doesn’t hurt, get dressed up, go to a party, drink tequila until you forget your own name and wake up in someone else’s bed? You could. None of those were my style though.

My love for Jared began in kindergarten. He lived next door and I followed him around like a lost puppy. He was two years older than me and thought girls had cooties, but as the years passed things changed and it became clear that he wanted those cooties all over him. What started as stealing glances in sixth grade became stealing kisses in eighth and by the time we reached our junior year in high school, we had given each other our bodies in every imaginable way. We had a love that was made for the movies. You know, the epic ones where the good guys always win, the guy always gets the girl, but with more action. Not the Romeo and Juliet ones where its all tragic and shit. By senior year, we were one of those legendary high school couples. The ones everyone else wanted to be. I had his class ring and his heart and I was dreaming of weddings and white picket fences.

Please understand, I loved Jared with the kind of love that makes you blind to all the red flags. A love so pure that you miss the flashing caution lights telling you the bridge is out ahead. If I had known where we were heading I would have kept my eyes on the road and things might have been different.

Her name was Raquel. Like the movie star. She blew into our little town of Lafitte, Louisiana halfway through senior year. While I had always seen myself as the sweet girl next door, she was sultry, broody, and tall, with long dark hair sporting splashes of rainbow color in it. She wore tight jeans, and torn shirts and red lipstick that made her full lips pop so much that the boys in our high school were dropping books and tripping over themselves every time she walked by. She carried herself with an aura of power like a sex goddess. Every girl in school hated her because we all wanted to be her, but nobody in this backwoods town had the knowledge of the dark voodoo we all assumed she was using. Nobody knew where she came from or why she chose our town, but with the hurricane like destruction and heartbreak that she wrought, it’s no wonder someone didn’t drop her in a swamp sooner. She started at one end of the high school popularity food chain and just chewed up boys and spit them out one after another. She broke the heart of nearly every girl in the senior class and left the boys like discarded beer bottles on the side of the road as she used them up and moved on to the next victim.

I wasn’t worried when she showed up. I was confident that Jared and I were solid. I foolishly thought that there was no woman out there that could take him from me. I would never have thought that Jared was the kind of guy that would fall for the charms of trash like that. Especially after watching the havoc she played on the football team. I was safe from her influence, until Jared broke up with me two days before prom and went with Raquel. It was on prom night, as I stood in the shadows outside his car with the steamed-up windows listening to her steal his love away from me with a red dress hugging full curves and hips that knew how to make a car rock that my life slid into the swamp as smoothly as a gator and I knew he was lost to me. At that moment something in me irrevocably broke.

So, what do you do when someone breaks your heart? I borrowed my brother’s gator hunting boat and decided Nobody was stealing my man.

I know that sounds like an overreaction and maybe it was but he was mine. We belonged to each other and he had soiled more than the backseat of his car with that harlot! I wasn’t having it! She had to go. I might have lost my mind a little at that moment, but really, wouldn’t you have done the same thing?!

How you ask? It was so easy. I waited outside her house, after Jared dropped her off from one of their steamy hump fests and when she walked up to the dark porch I was waiting in the shadows. I hit her in the head with a cast iron skillet. She went down like the whore she was, and I drug her to the trunk of my car, dumped her in and drove to the boat ramp where my brothers boat was anchored. I loaded her unconscious body into my brothers’ boat and went out for a little moonlit alligator baiting.

I admit it was messy work. Nobody tells you how hard it is, dismembering a body. Nobody tells you how much blood spray there is when the person you are hacking up is still alive. The smell of blood and shit make you want to wretch and I did, but each time I dropped a piece of her over the edge of the boat it felt cleansing to my heart.

I left most of her parts here and there in the swamp and then long before the sun came up, I washed the blood from the boat and left it anchored where I found it. I cleaned the machete and the fishing knife I employed. I drove home with the sunrise, and returned my mamas skillet to the rack and slipped off to bed. I was careful. Problem solved. Now Jared and I could return to the plan.

There wasn’t much of a fuss when Raquel disappeared. Everyone just assumed that she had moved again. Things would have been just fine if Jared had just apologized and returned to my side where he belonged, but that little taste of freedom broke the hold I had on him and now that he had a taste of forbidden fruit that’s all he hungered for. He started spending his nights with girls of questionable reputations. I had to admit that he was lost to me forever.

So, what do you do when someone breaks your heart?

I though removing the temptation would solve the problem, but it turns out that Jared was the problem all along. I wasn’t going to be made a fool of so I borrowed my brothers’ boat…...again.

Jared was harder work. More muscle to cut through and he spent so much time crying and fussing as I cut off his arms and legs that I finally slit his throat so he would shut up. I thought about keeping his manhood in a jar to remember him by but it had never been that special. Just like Raquel he fed the gators and like her I was careful.

Jareds disappearance garnered more attention but there was no investigation . Those text messages he sent me about leaving town with a girl he had met removed suspicion and I received sympathy from everyone. After all, how was I supposed to go on without him. I played the part perfectly. The tears, the wailing and then dramatically fake tried to kill myself a couple days later. Things started to settle down again and I am sure It would have been ok until I started having nightmares. Jared calling to me, his mangled corpse crawling toward me. I would wake up sweating and soon I wasn’t sleeping at all. In the end it wasnt guilt that made me turn myself in. Killing them didn’t really heal my heart at all, I just did what I though had to be done but it angered me that nobody acknowledged my brilliance. I killed two people and nobody had a clue. My ego couldn’t stand it so here I sit. I’m sure they will make a movie or something about me. It should be a lesson to others not to break a girl’s heart.

So, here’s my confession. All wrote down like you wanted. I can see the doubt in your eyes but I brought evidence. Its in that box there, the one with the brown paper. You should careful opening it. Like I said, I threw most of their parts in the swamp. I kept the hearts.