How to Get over a Bad Breakup

I’ve always felt like an alien. I never know how I should react.

When I see the soft curve of Angie’s shoulders and back barely lit by the light spilled in from the door, I get nostalgic. I know what it’s like to be in there, in that bed, underneath that body. Everything feels right; I don’t have to think or worry. All our words are soft, and we lie there and laugh in our little world of clean polyester bedding and downy pillows. Our hopes and dreams are in that little fortress of floral patterns. Instead, it’s Johnny underneath her. He’s oblivious, raptured inside that world, exploring every inch of it. Angie’s face switches from ecstasy to shock in a moment. They both turn, deer in the hall light.

There’s a French word (of course there is) for the moment when you catch your best friend banging your girlfriend when you visit them at college. ‘L'esprit de l'escalier’ “wit of the staircase”: repartee thought of only too late, on the way home. I read that in a dictionary. I think of a million repartees as I sprint down the flight of stairs from her fourth-floor dorm.

“How could you?”

“You cheating whore!”

“I hope that mole on your ass is cancerous.”

Even just inarticulate screaming and a proper slam of the door.

I closed the door as quietly as I opened it. Thanked her roommate who let me in. She just nodded with a knowing look.

Alien mode takes over and I try to think through logically what would make this situation less awful. My primary need is safety. I run down the stairs so I can sit down on a bench in the quad, breathless, I pull out my phone. Bad move, a picture of Angie and I stares back at me. She looks happy, I look happy. Obviously a lie, she wouldn’t have needed Johnny’s Johnny in her if she had been happy with me. Who was I going to call anyway? My next primary need was comfort and companionship, and that usually meant the two upstairs.

Is it weird that I want to call her? If I hear her voice over the phone it might feel like things are normal. Maybe that was the wrong dorm, it was an Angie lookalike or just an over-the-top prank. That would be just like Johnny. He’s a fun-loving guy, super outgoing and social. Angie’s the same, they’re both so passionate and full of drive. I thought it would rub off on me. But I am just the boring friend in the middle, the quiet one, the idiot who brought a bouquet of marigolds, Angie’s favorite, for a weekend visit. I am still holding the flowers, clutching them tight. The white cellophane they’re wrapped in is now crumpled. I see this all through blurry eyes as my tears fall onto the petals. Then a voice snaps me out of my reverie.

“That seems like an inefficient way of watering those plants.”

There’s an alien looming over me. Looming is the appropriate word because the alien is easily 6’,8” with bright orange and black striped fur. Maybe it’s because I just got cheated on and my brain is desperate for a girl to talk to me, so I am going to call the alien a ‘she’. Her long red hair is tied back and tucked under a green glowing cap with a logo that reads “Andromeda Deliveries”. Her lime green uniform looks a little ill-fitting and the hat doesn’t really suit her. A tag on her chest reads Glorp-Gloo.

“I need those plants.”

“The flowers?”

“Yes…. According to my read-out those are the closest concentration of ‘marigolds’.”

“Why do you need them?”

The alien girl just impatiently pointed at her hat.

“Okay Glorp-Gloo….”

“I am not Glorp-Gloo! That was the Slugovian who they fired. This uniform still smells like him, it’s florped up!

“Yeah, that sounds really…florped up.”

“For real and they have me out in the boonies picking up dying plants from primitive ape creatures. No offense.”

“Some taken. What is your name then?”

“Nyala!”

“Nice to meet you, I’m Max.”

Suddenly I am engulfed. Her enormous arms are around me and I’m being squeezed. I try to gasp for help, but the only noise is the air leaving my lungs and my heart jackhammering. Nyala suddenly let’s go and I stumbled backwards. I cough and suck air.

“You are well met Max, I have now given you a traditional human greeting!”

“You have?”

“Let me bring up my omni helper. Yeah, it says right here that was a ‘hug’. You should have elevated oxytocin and increased regard for me now. Can I have those flowers?”

“Jesus, yes, you can have the flowers.”

She smiles, or what I think is a smile and takes them. Then she begins walking away towards what is unmistakably a flying saucer touched down in the college quad.

I shake my head. I must be hallucinating. But that doesn’t matter. Either way the flowers are gone. I spent all the money I made in the last two weeks on a tank of gas, flowers , and a little in my pocket so I could take Angie out for dinner. I make for the parking lot. My red, beat to shit 1997 Suzuki Esteem waits for me. Then the door to the dorm opens. Angie and Johnny are there. They’ve had enough time to get dressed and have a damage control talk. Something in my guts twists around. I turn and run.

“Hey alien girl! I need something delivered!”

*****

According to Nyala there’s infinite alternate dimensions. (She dropped that in casual conversation while I sat on the co-pilot side of her cockpit.) So it stands to reason that there’s a version of me out there somewhere that met an alien girl from outer space and got in my rusted red car and drove home to pick-up a shift at my Planet Pizza. There’s another that made up with Angie, forgave her for her cheating. When I think of that I begin to spiral, and my stomach feels like it’s in a tightening vice.

“I know babe, it must be hard with us two hours away from each other.”

Which twists into Angie's voice, now metallic and sharp. “You turned down a scholarship to deliver pizzas. I get your dad is out of work but your parents could have figured it out. What was I supposed to do?”

More voices, my own, Johnny’s, my father’s, my mother’s join in a screeching chorus. I curl inwards, a pill beetle trying to hide in its shell.

“ALARM! BATTLESTATIONS! THREAT LEVEL ZETA FIVE!”

“Nyala, what do I do? Where’s my battle station?”

“Calm down, I turned that alarm on.”

“Why in the fuck would you do that?”

“You were making shame noises and self-loathing smells. I wanted that to cease.”

“You can smell what I'm feeling?”

“Yes, panic is much nicer.”

“Sorry. It’s just this thing with Angie and Johnny has me messed up.”

“Well, you missed your opportunity to pierce him with your feeding stinger for trespassing on your mating grounds. He’ll be on guard now.”

“I don’t have a stinger…”

“That’s disappointing.”

Nyala turned away and we fell into silence… for a few space hours.

*****

“…. It’s just I feel so betrayed and hurt, but at the same time I feel relieved. It seemed inevitable, like she was her and I was just fooling myself.”

“Uh huh.”

“Am I wrong about the whole thing because I’m thinking about it in a negative way?”

“Is this some human torture method? My skull is aching from listening to your circular, conclusion-less sentences that always end in an upward questioning inflection. As if I know the answer to any of this!”

“Well you’re an alien. You have a spaceship. I just thought you might have some … galactic wisdom.”

“Here’s some advice. It doesn’t matter why this ‘Angie’ or ‘Johnny’ decided to couple without you. They did. Now you need to do something instead of mewling like a Delaxxion moon-kitten.”

“I went into space with a real alien and now I am helping with an important galactic delivery. I feel like that was a bold response. But I also feel like I should have confronted them.”

Nyala just stared ahead with an inscrutably angry expression on her face. We stayed in that silence for what seemed like a long time. I wanted to leave it alone, I really did. My chest hurt though, like the words were trying to rip their way out. Once the initial shock of being in space, in a spaceship and rocketing towards destinations unknown, then it was just like a road trip.

“Am I just running away?”

“Physically you’re sitting in a chair and the ship is doing all the work.”

“I just don’t know how to handle this in the right way! How do I deal with all these feelings?”

“Why do you care? If it was me and I found my partner messing around with a filthy Tyraxian in my very bunk! Then I would just calmly! Reasonably! And with dignity! Take my stuff, walk away and go on with my life. You humans and your primitive brains are so emotional.”

“Why was that so specific?”

“Stop talking now.”

“ALARM! THREAT LEVEL ZETA FIVE!”

“Okay very funny, I’ll stop talking.”

“Flark! That’s actually the proximity alarm….Zeta Five…. We’ve got pirates or maybe…..”

Nyala leaned into the controls and cranked a wheel and dialed up her display. The ship throttled forward, and I held on. A green light exploded off the port side, leaving me blinded. “Dagrotting slurmvark!” I heard Nyala cursing as sensors pinged and alarms blared. By the time my vision cleared, we had throttled back down, and another alien was on the screen. This one looked similar to Nyala but had spots instead of stripes and a shorter mane of hair. Her voice could be heard through the din of the klaxons as she and Nyala argued.

“That’s your final warning! Give me back my ship and bring the marigolds, you’re not stealing my delivery!”

“Flark you! Weren’t you ‘negotiating’ with Qwertblob Slim in my bunk? He should have plenty of jobs for your cheating ass.”

“This isn’t a game, Nyala! That flower contract is too big for your little temper tantrum to mess up. This is the real world, you need to calm down and…..

Nyala slammed a fist onto one of the displays and the comms cut out. She turned to me eyes gleaming. Her fur was standing on end and her fangs barred. She spun and began tapping on controls. I had learned enough to grab onto my seat as we hurdle forward and pitched nose down in the same movement. Through clenched teeth I asked.

“Isn’t this your ship? Aren’t you with “Andromeda Deliveries”?”

“Listen monkey-boy, you want to get over a bad break-up here are some notes.

1. Pose as an employee of their company.

2. Steal their delivery orders.

3. Steal their ship so you can do the delivery before them.

4. When they catch up to you, send the gunner to shoot them with the aft turbo lasers.”

With that a hatch opened by my feet with a ladder leading down. Nyala gave me a meaningful look. Maybe in another parallel dimension I made a different choice, but I had to live in the now.

And that’s how I learned how to get over a bad breakup.