Rough Divorce

And nine years later...

I'm peacefully passed out in the backseat of my little SUV, with my head resting on a folded up blue sweatshirt for a pillow. I'm parking in an almost empty lot with the back of the Mazda facing the streetlight.

The noise from my cellphone wakes me up. It's 7:12 in the morning. I was up at 4:30am to take my mother to work.

I pull out the phone from the holster on my hip and look at it in almost disbelief. It's notification of an email from Morpheus. I think about some of the responses I could get out of him. "Hey, stop writing me. It's annoying." It has to be a minor irritation to keep receiving messages from someone week after week, despite refusing to reply. Like bad spam that sifts its way through the trash folder.

I put the device back on my hip, and curl up again on the bench seat. I wait for sleep, but I am wide awake now.

I open the email, expecting the worst. Morpheus apologizes first for "leaving [me] hanging" (a phrase I originally concocted in the last email I wrote him). He mentions the "rough divorce" and that he's traveling a lot for work. He concludes with the fact that he'll be back next week.

Maybe he enjoys my dogged insistence with writing him notes, or maybe he finds it ill taste and just doesn't share.

Regardless, the email proposes absolutely nothing. Just because he is returning to Yuppieville in a few days, doesn't mean we will see each other or even speak to one another when he comes home. The only information to gather is the mention of the terrible and always painful divorce.

In one of the last emails he wrote me, he said that he had had so much happen in his person life and that essentially he didn't want to see me, that he wouldn't bother me anymore. I naturally assumed then that he and his wife reconciled at the time.

Apparently, I was wrong.

Maybe he figures I'm easy bait, as all people are when they're in love with you--easy pickings. "Oh, I can't have so-n-so, but I will always have [Jae] around."

Or maybe he's secretly in love with me too after all these years and months of silence.

After all, isn't it simply wrong to use someone, who only allows it because he/she feels great affection for you?