It was as if Meg had taken a blender, dumped whatever was left of my heart inside, and turned the blades on the highest setting. As the stainless steal edges rotated with the power of one hundred horses, my arteries were torn piece by piece, the blood spilling out into my chest cavity, slowly filling and drowning me in my own bodily fluid. I couldn’t feel my skin when I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming, but something assured me that this was reality. Maybe it was the fact that the harder I bit my lip, the more I sensed the pain, and the more I felt my boiling blood drip over my chin. Maybe it was because I kept reminding myself that if I were asleep, I wouldn’t have been suffering so much. But I think mainly it was due to knowing that when you’re sleeping, I mean really sleeping, you know it. Subconsciously, you know that you’ll eventually wake up and take refuge in that you were never hurt or scared or confused. And I didn’t have that notion. At all.

“It wasn’t you,” Meg pleaded as I smudged the blood that poured over my jaw. I took my fingertips away from my face and wiped them on my jeans. The stain they left was the least of my problems.
Jason scrambled to find his clothes in the corner, holding pillows against himself like the typical embarrassed cheater. He looked like Lucky, the Lucky Charms iconic leprechaun, worrying about how those little kids keep chasing him because they want their cereal. But, to me, Meg wasn’t any cold cereal with artificial marshmallows tossed in for the cavities. She was the girl I had worked hard to get to like me, and who I had finally thought had begun to be a good person. Meg was the pancake breakfast with Vermont maple syrup, not the fake stuff, with a side of seasonable fruit salad and perfectly crispy bacon, not the turkey kind. I woke up every morning thinking about how great that breakfast would taste. Now that I knew she was nothing more than a child chasing a leprechaun with a big red box, I realized that I wasn’t superstitious enough to have ever believed that she was different.
Meg was fully dressed now. “It was me,” she insisted. My ears were closed to anymore false promises. I closed my eyes and tried to focus. The moment my eyelids hit my bottom lashes, immense balls of saltwater leaked out and left trails as they shot down my scorching cheeks. She was wrong. It wasn’t her; it was me. I was stupid enough to believe that she had changed. Other than realizing to my despair that in addition to my ever-growing pile of bills and debt from Meg’s dates, I now owed my best friend twenty dollars from the bet I’d made with him. I wondered why I had continually thought that I could transform Meg into someone whom I would eventually like to date. I asked myself what potential I had ever seen in that Medusa-like creature who chose to torture me. I asked myself if she was the one torturing me, or if I deserved it for being such a numskull. I was so gullibly blinded by love. Whatever I had seen in her was not love, so there was no way I could have ever been blinded. I was given placebos of love pills which in turn had allowed me to make myself believe that I was seeing straight, while the whole time I was blind, although my vision remained twenty-twenty. I messed with my own head. I played tricks on myself. It was a scam. She was a fraud. I was stupid. And Jason was nothing but a giant jerk.
Without wanting to hear another word of Meg’s sorry speech, I turned and walked away. I stepped over a gray embroidered pillow lying on the plush pink carpet, around a puddle of jeans and too-tight blouses, and upon reaching the doorknob, I turned it to the right, as I had done so many times before, and left the ugly room for the last time.