After leaving her house that morning, she decided to never return.
She was done; it was over. He never treated her all that well. That
prick. Why did he always have to smell so bad? His bathing schedule
was so irregular that he sometimes looked as though he was growing
moss in his armpits. Algae of the inside of the knee. He grew moisture
enamored organisms everywhere his skin regularly met other skin.
No wonder tongue kissing him tasted so bad. Like licking a gym sock
after being doused in barbecue sauce and sweet relish. Unpleasant,
really.

He treated her like shit. Acted as though he owned her. What a douche
nozzle. How do you know when to leave a man, really a boy, after all
that time? Why was I willing to put up with his abuse for so long? What
kept me willing to live in that dump? We didn’t have a marriage license.
He never asked me to marry him. Would I have even said yes? That’s
the problem; I would have. We had been together so long, that it was
becoming the assumed result of our coupling by all our friends. Both
of them, that is. We hung out regularly with this married couple a couple
of years younger than us. We knew them from work. That is, my fuck of
a boyfriend and I worked with the wife. She is awesome. Doesn’t scream
or yell. Is a cool customer. And always knows the perfect cutting remark
for the customer who just left the store. She always makes me laugh at a
time when I need it.

The husband’s a good guy. Not particularly interesting, but he seems to
make her happy. He’s one of those guys who is a person you never think
about, but apparently in private is a wonderful person who is loving, funny,
and kind. Way better than this fuck I’m leaving. He is unbearable all the
time. He takes his unburdened honesty as a mark of moral achievement.
He is willing to say mean things at any moment, if it occurs to him during
conversation. He knows when to not say things, but chooses not to. Right,
that kind of guy. Anyway, my life is way more interesting than this asshole
that stole productive years of my existence; so I won’t mention him again.

She hated how her life had turned out. She had spent nearly half a decade
in this town next to the middle of nowhere. You could see where the nowhere
started in the morning as the sun rose. If you drove in your car to the edge
of town, turned the car off, got out, and sat on the hood, you could watch
the sun hit the desert in a peculiar way that demarked a particular bump
in your vision that said, here it is. The beginning of the end of where.
Across that shining moment was where where ended. But if you stayed
in this town, like Moses on the mountain looking at the promised land
near death, you would never know the bounds of life, never see the possibilities,
never have fucked more than one human being in your sorry life. You wouldn’t
know what it was like to experience snow in winter. So, she left. Wanting
to experience the snow she had seen in movies where children looked happy,
dumb men failed to get the hot girl in Aspen, and where Santa struggled to
get presents to believers around the world without the help of some grumpy
nonbeliever turned saint. Her life began again that day. The day she went
north into the middle of nowhere.