The Heartbreak Pill by Anjanette Delgado

Author:Anjanette Delgado
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

{fifteen }

And life went on.

Exactly one month later, Martin and I were legally divorced. In fact, in a no-fault divorce state such as Florida, the defendant doesn’t even have to appear in court. The person who sued for divorce just waits in a room with other miserable people until they call her name and her lawyer takes her place to her left.

“Name?”

“Erika Luna.”

“Address?”

“3333 Rice Street, Apartment 7, Coconut Grove, Florida, 33133.”

“Now, please answer yes or no to the following questions. Is your marriage irremediably broken?”

Can you imagine asking anything crueler to someone who is seconds away from being officially divorced?

“Ms. Luna, the court will ask you once more. You need to answer yes or no, loud and clear, for the record. Is your marriage—”

“Yes, yes, yes! It’s broken, all right. Absolutely ruined…destroyed, not so much as a rag left, you happy?”

Attorney Consuelo made an apologetic gesture to the judge and pushed me out of there in a hurry.

And the thing is, at this point, divorce annoyed me but it didn’t hurt me. I’d finally gone from the false “to Hell with him” of a month before to an “I could care less” that cared so little it was barely there.

How did I do it? Well, I’d love to tell you I did it by being the courageous, strong, integral woman my mother raised me to be. And I do admit it’s true what they say: time does heal. Every day was a bit better than the one before. But what did it matter when nights continued to be a humungous piece of apocalyptic shit?

After the disaster of that first time drinking my own chemistry mix from Hell, my intention was to leave well enough alone. I said to myself that it was crazy to think I could invent a new drug, and such a complicated one at that, all by my misguided self. If others with more resources and know-how than I had not done it, there was probably a good reason for it, and that all I’d manage to do would be to turn myself into the town’s scientific laughingstock for trying to “make a career out of my divorce,” as Martin had accused me of doing.

But science is nothing if not persistent. It began to stalk me. Suddenly, Helena Fish and her book turned up everywhere. I counted at least five movies, six TV shows, and nine advertisements in which people asked for relief against heartbreak in some way or another. A highway billboard announced: “Yvonne Montero no longer suffers for love. Find out why, Monday through Friday, at seven, eight central, on Telemundo.”

But the last straw was my father, who called me one night to tell me of the death of the Puerto Rican announcer who used to recite a popular Christian commercial in the seventies that went something like this: “Loneliness hurts. The twentieth-century man is a lonely man.” I heard this as a personal reprimand from twentieth-century man for my lack of courage and commitment to humanity and to my career.

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