Unhinged by Anna Berry

Author:Anna Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

I spend a few weeks at Sharon and Brian’s apartment. Dean finally resurfaces at his parent’s home. It turns out that he has had a nervous breakdown of his own that involved him living in his car for a while in rural Wisconsin. He takes medical leave from his job, and talks to me occasionally on the phone. I apologize for threatening to kill him. I apologize for all my voicemail rages, and for calling him a cocksucker and an asshole. He tells me that he understands, he tells me that it’s not really my fault I acted that way. “You had a breakdown, I had a breakdown. I know that now. I understand,” he says. But he doesn’t sound convinced.

I have found a freelance job doing desktop publishing and editing on a short-term contract that pays well. The time comes for Dean and me to move into the apartment we rented together in Ravenswood. Brian and Sharon help me move. Dean shows up with his furniture and speaks to me civilly. Everything seems back to normal. But it isn’t.

Once Dean has moved in all his furniture and household items, he gets up to leave.

“You’re not staying here?” I ask.

“I need some time,” he says. “I need some time at my parents’.” He will not meet my eyes. He leaves.

I plunge on. My rages and mood swings eventually even out. I go to work and get through most days without a single thought of causing harm to myself and others, with occasional lapses that I suppress with alcohol and cable TV. I send Dean dozens of apology-love-note e-mails that go unanswered. I wait for him to contact me and tell me that we will be together in our little love-nest forevermore.

He doesn’t.

I settle into the apartment—a sunny, spacious one-bedroom-plus-den on a tree-lined street, an apartment with new carpeting and an eat-in kitchen and a bay window overlooking mature trees and a mailbox in the lobby that the landlord has marked with mine and Dean’s names. A week or two after I move in, I get a letter.

I don’t have the letter any longer. I burned it with a long-handled butane lighter in a brass bowl designed for holding incense. I don’t have it any longer, but I do remember most of what it said.

Dean sends me a break-up letter. He can’t face me himself or even call me to end things between us, so all I get is a laser-printed letter on cheap recycled paper, typed and folded and unsigned. He calls me a walking disaster area. He calls me a manipulative bitch. He calls me a lunatic fringe case. He says my personality is borderline, encloses a pamphlet on borderline personality disorder and a clipping of the anonymous classified ad he took out insulting me in the “Personal Messages” section of the Chicago Reader. He says that I and my mind and my body are damaged beyond repair, he says that I deserve to be miserable and alone, he

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