With a twisted sorrow etching my face, I looked at the girl I gave nearly two years of my life to. Her eyes gravitated toward my face, and our gazes locked. My heart began to burst with guilt and pain; I jeopardized everything we worked so hard for and strived to keep alive.

“What is wrong with you?” she snapped at me, her eyes slanting and becoming a hardened glare. Boiling to the surface, her anger fizzled like steam dissipating as it hits the open air.

I blurted with an equally as intense, but internal anger, “I don’t know.” Through my blurring eyes, which began to well up with tears and glaze over, I saw hers begin to overflow, bubbling over the rims of her lower eyelids. Her green eyes, like vibrant meadows surrounding a deep forest — at some point long before this moment that which held so much love and joy — now displayed a storm of contempt and hatred. She raised her arms and brought her hands to her face, stifling her sobs with her palms; a barely audible phrase escaped her muffled mouth, “I don’t deserve this.”

I so desperately wanted to grab her curved waist and hold her close to me, to numb the encumbering pain that started to wash over her. Grief slowly settled in. A solo tear rolled down my cheek, uninhibited and unrestrained, the salty moisture soaking into the miniscule pores of my skin. I tried my best to keep my composure under complete control — I wanted to remain as calm as possible. My eyes moved around the room like snakes slithering on a slick and smooth surface, stopping on seven photo strips pinned up in a perfect line on her bedroom wall. These seven photo strips held twenty-eight eternal moments, beams of long-forgotten honeymoon happiness shining through the windows of time, each like a needle stabbing at my heart. Now I felt the excruciating pain of my betrayal radiating off of her and launching itself onto me; all of the anger inside her heart lashed out and bit at me like a dragon coming back to life after a deep slumber.

“I can never forget this,” she murmured, her voice twinged with burning indignation. Her eyes bored into mine. As the tears began to evaporate from her skin, she pointed toward her bedroom doorway. Slipping through her lips as though it had been rehearsed beforehand, she hissed, “Get out, and never come back.”

A sudden shock of reality and anxiety pulsed violently through my veins. Turning the direction of my gaze down toward the palms of my hands, I slowly raised my heavy eyes back to her face. Her mouth continued to move; as I stood there, she commenced to yelling, but her fury-filled words never made it to my ears. A feeling of detachment from the scene washed over me. With a heavy heart, I made my way out of her bedroom, out of her home, and out of her neighborhood in my empty car.