The Soldier That Almost Was
But he unknowingly took his war elsewhere, unsanctioned.
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Sometime around 2009, I had just gone through a terrible, nasty, scratch-and-claw breakup, as a stupid twenty-something-year-old kid. I got a check for $1,200 the same day my girlfriend of 4 years to that very day sent me an inbox on Myspace, stating she could no longer do it, it was over and I had to go. I had to leave the apartment we shared. The awkward part about the inbox was we lived together and I read it on the computer next to the bed she was still asleep in.
To say I was broken up and bitter about it would be the understatement of the decade. Now, any reasonable person would have used said $1,200, to establish some sort of new living situation — or I don’t know, something responsible probably, right? Not me. I was going to use it to make her mad before I packed and left. I went shopping and came back with throwback jerseys for myself, shoes, again for me. A case of Pepsi for her Grandmom who stayed with us — and nothing but cold stares for the woman I loved and the one who wrote the stupid fucking inbox I was so incredibly caught off guard by. I was hurt. But I packed and left. I took anything and everything I ever paid for, out of pure spite and not necessity. I’m not proud of it, but it happened. I’m talking I took brand new cell phones and steak out of the freezer. Simply because I paid for it. And to start a fight, I’m sure.
But after that — I was on a warpath. Anything in my way would regret it. You couldn’t tell me nothing about anything and I knew what I had to do and was going to do when she moved a dude I knew into our apartment weeks after our breakup. It was my duty to make someone else feel the pain I did. To make right of the fictional wrong I convinced myself had been done to me. To save face, name, and reputation. I wasn’t going out like that.
I won’t get into specifics for legal and personal reasons despite nothing serious (thankfully) happened other than me taking a trip to the hospital, after trying to fight said dude while so intoxicated I could barely stand. He was three times my size and double my weight — and most importantly sober, He still was enough of a coward to hit me first and ended up splitting my head open and doing some damage to my nose — whatever. It was just the…
