I was standing beneath her trying to catch my clothes as she overturned a drawer to the dresser I gave her that held my things. I thanked god that I’d taken my watch the last time I’d stayed over so it didn’t hit me in the face on its way to smash on the pavement like the other things I hadn’t been able to catch. She was upset. She could have been right about some things. I could have been moving to fast, not that I’d asked for her hand in marriage just yet.

She was a good-looking Texas redhead cowgirl. That wasn’t an exaggeration. Her voice held the Texas twang mine lacked from my youth in California and she was actually a redhead. It was a deep ruby red that fell neatly across the sides of her face in clean cascades. The first time I’d met her I’d figured that it was dyed. Colored somehow. It wasn’t though; it was just what color her hair was naturally. That was rare where I we worked. And she was also a cowgirl. The first night that I stayed over at her little apartment she told me about how her father owned a farm in a town to the north west of Texas that I’d never heard of and neither had anyone else I’d told about it. She used to ride her father’s horses and help him out with his small herd of cattle. It sounded nice. I’d figured that all that tough work was what had given her the tight body she was so proud of.

I loved her and having her drop my things on me didn’t help my mood. It might not have weighed so heavily upon me had the girl just taken me inside and told me that she thought I was moving too fast and that we ought to slow down. She could have kissed me gently on my forehead – as I’d done to her that first night we were together – and told me that she just didn’t feel that way about me. She could have handed me a box of my things and said that she wasn’t comfortable with me keeping personal affects at her apartment. All of that would have still have broken my heart but what she did was worse.

She and I worked at the same establishment and recently – at night, which was when we always worked – I would give her a ride home on my motorbike. It was fun, I was a good driver, and she was one of those girls who seemed to like the feeling of the night wind slipping up her skirt. The air was usually warm and was comfortable even at two-thirty on those dark Dallas mornings. The night before she had her car with her – a poorly kept little Civic she bought used out of the weekly paper – and was gone before I had finished making the rounds and bouncing the drunks out of the club. As I walked out, hearing only the sound of the freeway and the buzz of the neon long legged cowgirl with a lasso, I realized that she was nowhere to be found and that that may have been on purpose.

I rode home and crawled into bed without saying a word, silently afraid as to the reason that she seemed to have been avoiding me all night. She still toyed playfully with the customers like she always did, but that night she seemed to elude the tables I stood over. With my flashlight in hand, I kept an eye on her as the music changed and she rotated around the room, careful at the same time to make sure that no one harassed any of the girls more than was acceptable at that kind of place. Then I would hear some kind of commotion and turn to deal with it, returning to see that she had skipped past me. The first few times it seemed strange. After that it seemed deliberate.

I never told her that I loved her. I did, however, imply that I probably felt that way, though I wasn’t sure since I had never actually felt that way before. She seemed to think it was cute and kissed me on the cheek before retiring to the bathroom for an hour for reasons described only as “woman troubles.” I didn’t think anything of it. Since she and I began seeing each other I had begun to keep a small reading collection on the floor of her bathroom about which she would complain saying that it kept me far to long and that – with a pout no less – she would not stand for it. Maybe she was reading, I thought. The dresser I bought her – out of which she later dropped my things from the second floor balcony – she had seen in the window at an antique store in Deep Ellum and which I spent maybe more money than was actually prudent to buy for her. It was a corporal form of our love, I thought. And I knew she’d like it.

She did, of course. She told me so, it wasn’t just speculation. Even after she had emptied the drawer she was swinging over the edge, she was still careful not to drop it or dent it by banging its soft wood into anything. Though it was nice that she didn’t also drop it on me, along with my four pairs of boxer shorts, a couple of shirts, a pair of pants, and numerous un-matched socks, it was sad that even though our love was over, the dresser continued. A part of me wished to see it too vanish.

She had the day off from work, the day that she rained my clothes down on me, and I dropped by on my way to the club. It wasn’t perfectly on my way, but I thought the deviation might be worth it if only to try and clear up whatever it was that bothered her. Unfortunately I didn’t even have a chance to ask. My motorcycle – universally despised in my own apartment complex – was no quieter in hers. Before I was off my bike, she was at the railing of the balcony screaming about why she could never see me again. I was a bad guy, she told me. I wasn’t giving her her space, she said. I wanted to move to fast, she screamed over and over again. There was no talking to her. I stood, my face turned upwards, mouth in an expression of disbelief, and just took in all of what she told me. Before I could even begin to try and explain away any of what she seemed to despise me for the first sock struck me in the face. It wasn’t a neatly fold pair, as my socks were usually kept, but a single sock thrown by its lonesome onto my frown below. Looking at it, its dulled whiteness almost yellow from years of use, two stripes, one brown, one blue, and a small hole forming in the heel, I wasn’t even sure it was mine. I didn’t even wear white socks. It didn’t matter. Other items that were hers fell also in the parade of fashion.

I thought about the Fourth of July’s I used to spend as a kid in suburban Pleasant Hill with my two buddies and the fireworks we used to set out our towels for at least two hours early to get the prime viewing location. They were always held at the local high school and every year was warned to be the last year unless the people that showed up in teaming masses ponied up a few bucks for the next year. They weren’t great fireworks – nothing like I’d seen in Dallas since moving – but as I watched socks fall towards me, I thought about the fireworks. My friends, the three of us, used to stretch out, heads all on one beach towel to keep the grass from scratching our faces and the bugs from exploring our hair and because we never seemed to remember to bring more than one. We’d lie and watch as the guys in charge of the pyrotechnics would launch no more than one rocket every few seconds. It was enough time that the audience could take in the enormity of that single explosion before another took flight to be reveled on its own merits. That was what my clothes were like. One by one, they fell, each giving its own clue that our relationship was not just done, but over. Then, again like the men in charge of the fireworks, when she was tired of playing with me, of giving me little hints as to what the meaning was, and she just wanted to be finished with it, the rest were put into the air, and I was told to go home.

I still hadn’t moved, save for slapping things out of the air to keep anything more from hitting me in the eyes, when she pulled the drawer back to safety and stormed into her apartment. I heard, but couldn’t see, the door slam, and knew that it was done. I looked around at my scattered belongings and tried to come up with a plan to remove them back home, but no spark of thought occurred. I laughed as I kicked a t-shirt off of my foot and climbed back onto my bike, pulling the navy blue helmet over my head. I circled the parking lot twice, surveying the remains of what was, before gunning the engine and heading home. I was going to call in sick that day.