Turns out she was just another in the long line of daddy-wound darlings who come limping into my life looking for a soft place to land. The kind of girls who mistake chaos for charisma, who think emotional unavailability is just another flavor of mystery. And I saw it coming. Hell, I practically handed her the red flags myself — here, baby, tie ’em around your waist like a skirt.

It wasn’t my face — I’m not some square-jawed Instagram Adonis. And it sure as hell wasn’t my “gentle soul.” Maybe it was my jokes. Or the way I carry myself like the world owes me a blowjob and a cigarette. Or maybe — most likely — it was the money, the drugs, the sex that didn’t stop when the sun came up. Maybe it was the thrill of being bad with someone even worse. That final dirty fling before she settled down into her beige Pinterest life with that closet homo guitar player who doesn’t know how to slap her ass right.

I’ve been that guy before — not the closet homo guitar player — but the last stop on the “fun” line. The human version of a Vegas weekend. The reason they cry in the shower when they get home. And usually I’m fine with it. I’d wave goodbye, blow a kiss, wipe the cocaine off my chest, and get back to work. But this one… this one I fell in love with.

And it ended like most of my love stories do — badly. Catastrophically. The kind of heartbreak you can’t fuck your way out of.

I used to think heartbreak could be drowned. Just push it down into the bottle until it suffocates. But each time it comes back up stronger, meaner, drunker. You start with bourbon, end with rotgut. The standards drop. The dignity goes. And eventually, you find yourself drunk at 3AM texting someone who only loved you when she hated herself.

She was the bottom of my barrel. The final pour. The girl I loved when there was nothing left to give. And fuck, I did love her. Not just who she was, but who I was with her — before the booze, before the blow, before we lost the plot.

Our love lived in the moments between the highs. That rare, clean morning sunlight. The way her hair fell across her face when she slept. The quiet I could only find beside her. That’s what I miss. Not the girl, necessarily — but the feeling. The way she made everything ugly feel holy, even for a second.

But love like that never lasts. Not when it’s held together by molly and denial.

I kept hoping she’d come back, sober and soft, like a miracle. I replayed the ending so many times, rewriting the script like I was gonna somehow earn a different one. But she’s gone. And that part of me — the man who believed she might stay — he’s gone, too.

Now I drink coffee instead of whiskey. I take walks instead of pills. I cry to Alanis fucking Morissette in the grocery store like a divorced mother of three. And I write. That’s the worst part. I write like someone who feels things, because apparently I do now.

They say you can’t love someone more than you miss them. But the truth is, I missed myself more. The version of me I used to be before I needed to be someone else to be loved. That guy had a shot. That guy could still climb out.

And I did. Clawed at the bourbon barrel until my nails cracked and my knuckles bled. Got sober, for real this time — not for God or country or liver or legacy — but for her. For the memory of her. For the heartbreak she carved into me like initials in a bar top.

Because that’s how much she meant to me — I quit all my favorite vices just so the ghost of her wouldn’t haunt them.

Now I walk out into the sunlight clean and unsteady, carrying the weight of every mistake I made. And I still think of her. I still hope she climbs out too. I still hope she finds something better than me — something safer.

But if she ever does, and if she ever looks back…

…I hope she remembers the way I loved her.

Messy. Wild. Honest.

Like a fire that didn’t know how to go out.

—P.

Featured: Edvard Munch’s “Love and Pain” — with a shot of Jamo

Phil Italiano

Publisher, Visionary, Provocateur

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