As my body slumps over the kitchen table, I revisit that painful evening once more. The memory hurts. It grasps and pulls at my every fiber; it leaves me gasping and in a sweat-covered stupor that only comes when you search the very depth of your soul for an answer that you will never find. Why? Why had he betrayed me in such a way? Why? Why had she let him? The memory, it grows. It becomes sentient. It becomes so much more than a memory. It becomes reality. It consumes me. Painful visions of my reality come in nauseating waves once more but then, I begin to harden.

Something much worse then everything I had felt prior erupts and looking back I would’ve lived with the constant torment and pain and anguish that had become my life than, what I had become. The pain and suffering disappear, only tiny pests to the beast that had awaken. I open my red and swollen eyes and understand for the first time what my rage-filled body must do. I rise from the chair, of which I had sat, with such force that the table in front of me skids forward and meets the wall with a shuddering halt. I look down and see the flowers I had gotten for her. Flowers of celebration. Flowers to signify a special strength and bond of two that had become one. Flowers who’s meaning turned out to be false and thus, they lie, lie like she did, on the floor surrounded by the broken body of the vase and water, like blood, puddled around it.

I walk towards the door, grab my keys with shaking but, sure hands, and the black handle, I slip, into my coat pocket. I slam the door and walk towards my car. As the door slams, the heart shaped picture frame falls; it was our picture; it was our favorite but it meets the floor with a resounding crash louder than any ordinary picture frame would. The crash is accompanied by a crack, jagged but perfectly down the center to where the single picture becomes two. In a memory of the future, I bent down and picked up each half. They wouldn’t quite fit together again, as if some piece were missing, and Madeline’s body led up to what should have been her near perfect face but, it was gone too. A gash was in its place.