In Case of Fire - Accelerate (Part I)

There I sat, staring down at a wedding invitation. I had just gotten back from a shift at The Asterisk, this small hole in the wall place that I would bartend at. I hated working the lunch shift, but when Stella called off, I didn't have much of a choice. I grabbed my mail and headed upstairs barely setting my stuff down before shuffling through the small pile. And there it was, a letter from Derek. I could tell without even opening it from the D. Hunter scrawled at the top left-hand side of the envelope. I used to always tell him to invest in return address labels because his handwriting was shit. But he always insisted it was taken more personally, if the sender wrote out everything themselves.

WHAT THE FUCK.

How does this ass-hat have the audacity to send me anything other than a check after the way things ended? I thought to myself. I had literally lived with this man for three and a half years of the five that we were together. It was one of those typical situations where the woman wants more out of the relationship than the man is willing to give. Instead of the man just being honest about where he is at, though, he continues to tell her all the things that she wants to hear and string her along. Of course I was just as much to blame, I should have seen through it all, I should have known. I should have not spent my entire inheritance trying to help him build his business. But I'd spent the past two years after we'd split processing through that and realizing that putting that kind of weight on myself wasn't productive or any type of path to really healing.

I tore open the envelope and felt every tiny fracture in my heart that had only half-heartedly healed from when he broke it two years ago begin to split back open. In that moment, I felt like throwing up.

Angelica Elise Duncan

to

Derek Michael Hunter

Saturday, the Twenty-Fourth of May

Two thousand and seventeen

Six o'clock in the evening

Reception to Follow

It didn't even say where the wedding was being held. So either it was a huge misprint or a very cruel joke. Why on earth would he send me an invitation to his wedding. In that moment it felt like just about the meanest thing anyone had done to me. I'd spent so much time lifting him up, supporting his dreams, hoping he'd return the favor and give me mine; marriage, children, a family. All for everything to go up in flames in a very nasty ending and a mere two years later, he's giving all of my effort and hard work to ...Angelica? Who the fuck was this chick? Suddenly rage consumed me. I dropped the envelope right where I was standing and landed on my couch, clutching my laptop. Furiously typing her name into Facebook, I was going to find out right now. I wish I had been able to stop myself, though. This woman looked...like me? Taller, and quite a bit less cute version of me. Her hair was quite different, but our features were similar and she smiled slightly crooked like I did. It was the one thing he would never miss a chance to comment on, my insanely cute crooked smile he would say. There they were, together, seemingly happy. She had pictures for miles of the two of them, all over the city. It wasn't until I came across a picture of them outside The Asterisk that tears just started falling down my face. I couldn't believe my eyes. Not only had he moved on, not only was he giving this woman everything that I had held on for so long to receive, but he was literally right outside of my place of work. I died inside a little right then. A piece of my humanity literally fell away and I ripped up his dumb ass wedding invitation.

It wasn't that I was bitter, though in this moment that could be debated. It was that for months after we broke up, I had to hear friends recant pieces of information that were missing from when we were together. People coming to me, telling me how he'd made a comment or grabbed them a certain way. Inbox messages indicating that he was always looking for more. There was no settling, he always made himself available to other women, despite my heart. And weather he'd changed or not, whether he was faithful to this woman or not, she literally was living a life that I thought I deserved to have. I'd spent all of this time bending over in positions that were foreign to me, to polish him and now I was broken and he was living my blessing.