Act 6

A month or so passed by and I let everything that had happened soak in. I felt like I had just been picked up tossed around like a rag doll and dropped back in time 4 yrs. I was completely starting over again, no car, no job, and no home. The one constant in my life at the time was Heather, and I looked forwarded to seeing, hearing, even just being around her whenever possible. Granted I was in a financial downfall, I still enjoyed taking her out to eat, or the occasional movie, even though she didn’t want me to pay for it. My daily routine was to browse the online jobs for about an hour when I woke up, then hit the newsstands for the papers and classified. When I got home I’d then select all available jobs, and either email, or call to setup some sort of interview. After a week or so I could see the paper was useless as I was emailing out my resume by the dozens now on a daily basis just form online searches. But to no avail, things were still bleak since the whole dot com breakdown. When MCI, and a few other centers, closed that left over a 1000 qualified tech to fill the job market. It was a rat race in the tech field, and I was tossed dead smack in the middle of it.

Things seemed to be going well with Heather, that is I thought they were, we still kicked and we both seemed to enjoy each other’s company, but I still wanted more out of it, but now I couldn’t tell if she did either. She was still working, at her job, but had been notified of a lay off that was too occur, which put a serious cramp in the plan we had to go to at least visit Montana. We both had begun saving our change to take a trip there, we had also previously looked into getting an apt, but after my layoff that pretty much fell threw. I can honestly say, if it wasn’t for Heather I probably would be living somewhere else right now. After everything I had gone through I saw Phoenix as nothing more than a place where I didn’t feel welcomed. Nothing good had come out of me living there, and I had begun looking at moving back to California, the only problem was I didn’t know if Heather felt the same way towards me as I felt towards her, and I dreaded to think it wasn’t.

One day she called me up, she was having a hard day, now that she wasn’t working, she asked if I could help her get a new computer or if I could build her one. I took one of my systems I had bought at an auction from my old job and retro fitted it with a modem she had purchased and loaded an OS on it, and she was soon surfing the net and downloading crazy amounts of mp3’s. Living at a Tom’s allowed me to have high speed net access again, so I was able to get caught up with emails and so forth that had been building up from the past 6 months, I was also able to get in touch with some old friends from my chatting days. One day Heather had come over while I was chatting with an old friend, and was interested on how to chat with people over the Internet. I showed her how to access chat rooms via yahoo, and a few other various chat sites, and instant messengers, thinking nothing of it at the time, looking back though, that was key moment in what was to come.

Time passed and a sort of distance between the two of us began to grow. I began to wonder where I stood with her, I had gone to the county fair with Mike and some of his friends and this had been bugging me the entire time, finally Mike gave me the old saying his father once told us as we were kids “Shit or get off the pot”. While I was waiting for Mike and his friends to get drinks I decided to call, my stomach was full of knots and it felt like a million icicles pricking from the inside out. I hadn’t felt this way about doing anything since I was growing up. She didn’t answer at 1st and I felt a little relieved, but then again that didn’t solve the problem. I waited a few minutes and called back, this time the prickling feeling wasn’t has bad, I guess since the 1st call was like a dry run. She picked up and for the first time since meeting her I found myself speechless. I finally stumbled the words out and told her I really needed to talk to her that night, she responded back with she needed to talk to me as well. I told her I’d call her as soon as I left the park, to set something up, I didn’t want to do this over the phone. I felt shivers trying to think of what she needed to talk to me about, I couldn’t remember a time when she had said she needed to talk to me; it was usually the other way around. As I pondered what she wanted to talk to me, about, I let my mental guard down and allowed myself to think the best and plan for the best, whereas I normally hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

As we left the fair, I called her back and we met up at my apt, and made plans to go back to Mike parent’s house, as they were out of town. The prickling came back again, she had mentioned earlier about going to a 4 wheeling event with her the next morning and I had agreed, then she added she was going to meet someone she met off the net there, and emphasized on meet. I agreed, even though I was a little perplexed about what she really meant by “meet”, did she mean meet as in to check out his truck as she had stated or “meet” as in meet and then hook up if she felt it. Nonetheless I wasn’t going to let this deter me from what I need to tell her.

We got to Mike’s house and he promptly crashed out, he already knew what I was going to do, and encouraged me to do so. For some reason, I could bring myself to say anything for what seemed like forever, I was at a complete lose for words on how I wanted to tell her. Finally I went outside to have a cigarette and she followed, and asked me what was so important that I needed to tell her, Thinking no time is better than the present I stumbled through telling her how much I really cared for her, and that ever since we had meant I had felt something towards her. I told her that no other woman I had meant in a very long time had caused that type of reaction in me, and at 1st I was scared to give in to those feeling but that the more I had been around her the stronger they grew. I told her that even though everything in my world had been crashing down around me, I still looked forward to everyday I was able to see or hear from her, and that I had really missed her the last few weeks that we hadn’t talked. I told her how much she truly and deeply meant to me, and that I truly cherished the friendship we had flourished, and that no matter what I wanted to keep that. At the same time however I couldn’t help but to begin falling further and further into her, and I need to know whether or not, my feelings for her, were mutual or if what we had once started had never quite gone past more than what it was, a few mere moments of being something that might have been but never was. I paused for a few moments or maybe it was longer, time just kind of seemed to stand still, thinking what I had just spouted made no sense and then told her that I care for her more than as a friend, and that even though we had somewhat discussed it before, it seemed as if there was never any headway made out of it, and that I couldn’t stand to not let her know how much I cared for anymore, and I needed to know if she still felt the same way she did before about us.

There was a deafening silence, and then as quickly has the tingling in my stomach came it was gone, was it over, I was hoping so, yet it was far from it. She took a couple of minutes I guess to take it all in, prepping herself on whatever response she was to give. Meanwhile, I sat staring into the darkness and saw 3 falling stars graze across the night sky, no wishes made, for as each one crossed my path it was like a cut across my heart, as each passed there she gave a reason why, she couldn’t be with me, why she couldn’t be with anyone at the time. Two of them I knew of, they were ones she had mentioned months before. The last, was one I thought I’d never hear in my lifetime, and shot through me like a bolt of lightning. From that point forward, every ounce of my body went numb, my ears started ringing, it was as if every organ in me had sunk and I found myself trying to envelop my very being within the darkest point within the night sky. Yet no matter how hard I tried, it was unavoidable. I wished it was nothing more than a bad dream, and wanted to awaken, but in reality it was my darkest hour, the light I had wanted so bad, had been placed out of reach and fading, and there was nothing I could do about it. Everything I tried to locate to center myself on, was out of focus, it was as if I was tumbling through a bottomless abyss, inside I was crushed and tumbling uncontrollably, but on the outside I was frozen in the cold darkness of the night. There was no longer warmth from the light, and if there was I was oblivious to it. With no light there were no reasons, with no reasons there was no hope, I just wanted it all to end.

Act 7