Wait. Let me start over.

This was my third “Wait. Let me start over,” and even I knew I was just stalling, dragging it out. This wasn’t starting over. It wasn’t a beginning, it was an end. The end. And instead of biting down on a hunk of wood and pulling the arrow out of my stomach, I was twisting it, probably pushing it in a little further, and making it hurt more than I needed to, just so I could feel something. So I said, “Wait. Let me start over.” And she said “You’ve started over, you keep starting over. There’s nothing you can say that you haven’t said already. There’s nothing you can say that you haven’t said that I want to hear. I didn’t even want to hear what you said, but you said it, so there’s nothing I can do about that. No more starting over. You’re finished.”

Damn straight. Amen to that. Finished. I took my bags and left and she turned to her next customer and started dragging their groceries across the scanner.

This was my fourth break up today. I’d already broken up with the bank teller, leaning out the car window and yelling into the speaker, “I don’t like who I am when I’m with you!” I broke up with the surly teenage girl who made my sandwich at Subway (“We were better when we were just friends”). The break up with the squinty-eyed street guy who always hits me up for cigarettes outside the office was a breeze. We both knew it was coming, we could see it in each other’s faces. It was in the way we talked; no more intimacy, no more honesty. It had been coming for a long time. He said, “Excuse me sir, got a smoke?” and I said, “No,” and I think we’ll still be friends, but it won’t be the same. Still, it was pretty easy compared to the grocery checker. Too much water under the bridge there, too much history. I’d been in her line at least once a week for almost a year, lots of smiles flashed, pleasantries exchanged, we were a part of each other’s lives and I choked back tears as I marched, Kirk-like, through the automatic doors and into the parking lot.

An old man nodded and smiled on his way to the store and I said, “I don’t feel comfortable taking this any further.” An oily pigeon pecked at the oily pavement and I told it, “We bring out the worst in each other.” I told the bus stop not to call me any more and a street sign that I wanted to start seeing other people. There must have been another five break ups on the way to my car and, I don’t know, maybe fifteen more on the way home.

I was breaking up with the sun and the sky and the road. I was breaking up with the whole world. Breaking up.

Mr. Stitch is my landlord and he was hobbling around on the porch when I got home, hunched over with one crooked shoulder poking toward the sky and the other drooped, his tiny rat hand clutching his tiny rat cane and his top hat stove-piping off his bald, pale head.

“Mann!” He said, squawking my name, kind of like the noise seagulls must make when they fuck. “Mann!”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re yelling like that. All we do is yell. This isn’t communicating. When was the last time we really listened to each other?”

“Mann!!”

I let myself in and closed the door on my misshapen residence manager scratching around on the porch. As soon as I was inside, or “immediately upon my ingress” (if you prefer) the battalion of roaches, the dirty dishes, the dust bunnies, a lone, lanky, laconic mouse scattered and reformed themselves into battle lines, creepy and crawly and crisp with military efficiency, and began their advance across the warped wooden floor.

I would have none of it.

I told them they were strangling me, that I was completely losing my own identity in “us” that I wanted to be “me” again and they could be “them” and it was really the best thing for all of us. They protested. They mentioned our long walks by the river and that Christmas we blew off our families and stayed at the coast, but I was insistent. That was ancient history. We were ancient history. Once again they resorted to, “Can’t we go back to where we were before all this?” And once again I reminded them of all the nights that ended with screaming fights and angry accusations. Why was I closing myself off from them after I’d given them so much; scraps of food, flakes of my dead skin? Was I seeing other insects?

I crossed my arms and turned my back on them, all of them, all eight hundred and seventy seven, and I refused to be baited into an argument, even when they mentioned my drinking, even when they mentioned my mother. They pushed every button they knew I had and even a few that I don’t think they knew I had but secretly suspected. But I remained silent. There were tears, from all of us, and that coppery taste of sudden sadness and a heaviness in my stomach, but they finally left, scurrying away in a black wave under the door and across the porch and out of my life. We were broken up.

“Mann!!” Mr. Stitch screamed. “Maaannnn!!!!”