Beautiful Disaster

Angie pours herself another glass of champagne and watches the little bubbles fizz and pop. She catches sight of her reflection on the curve of the glass, which reflects a woman laden with misery. Her blue eyes are void of life. They carry the depth of pain unknown to many around her. Her blond hair is frizzy and she's still wearing the same green velvet robe from this morning. This is going to be a long, solemn evening.

The glass touches her lips and she drowns herself in the comfort of her drink. She drowns her misery in the bitterness of the champagne. The satisfaction lasts for a couple of minutes, and then she’s back for more, tipping the bottle a little higher than before to get the last of the champagne into her empty glass.

The lamp hanging above her head suddenly blinks, reeling her consciousness back to reality. Brian isn’t around to change the light bulbs anymore. In fact, he won’t be around for a long time, possibly forever. Her eyes dart to the picture of the two of them sitting on the mantelpiece, bordered by the crafty wooden frame she’d insisted they buy when they were in Italy last summer.

They looked so happy in the picture. It had been a windy fall afternoon two years back when their oldest son Maddox took that photo. Brian was wearing an old navy sweater and Angie was in a cream turtleneck and a turquoise cardigan. They had their arms around each other as they posed brightly for the camera on the creaky old swing in their backyard, like a happily married old couple. The two large oak trees in the background were solid and rooted to the ground, but the same could not be said about their marriage. 

Yes, even as Angie’s blue eyes were shining and Brian’s gray ones were crinkled at the sides as he grinned, Angie knew their happiness was false. The joy depicted in the picture was a deception to conceal all the bitter verbal lashings and angry tears throughout their twenty years of marriage. Deception was a game they played well. If the prize was separation, then they've both won.  

Angie thinks of all the guests who visited over the last two years, and how they stood at the mantelpiece admiring all the lovely family portraits of her family, including that picture of her and Brian.

“This is a great picture!” they’d say.

“Oh, yes, Maddox is an amazing photographer,” Angie would reply.

“Yes, he is. But I’m talking about you and Brian. You both look so good! So healthy, so happy.”

Of course they didn't know the truth hidden behind the smiles. They assumed everything they saw was real, from the gorgeous lilies in the living room to the cheerful family photos. They don't have to know the truth. Maybe someday they would, but not now.

The wounds are still so fresh. Angie isn’t ready to let anyone know Brian left her last night. She hasn’t called her family or her best friends. And she certainly isn’t going to tell her children. Not with Maddox studying for his finals in his dorm room and her daughter Elisha visiting her boyfriend in Spain.

It is just a matter of time before the children find out. Maddox’s graduation is in less than 3 weeks. Elisha will be flying back to attend her brother’s graduation. And Brian will be on the first plane out of Atlanta that morning. Everyone will be meeting up several hours before Maddox’s graduation ceremony to have lunch.

She and Brian are going to have to put on fake smiles again and pretend Brian hadn’t gone to Atlanta. The kids are not supposed to know he’d gone to live with his girlfriend. Laura is only a couple years older than Maddox, they could practically be siblings.

Brian had made Angie promise she wouldn’t say a word about his new relationship and about their plans for a divorce, at least not until Maddox’s graduation was over.

It pained Angie to reach that agreement. Accepting that Brian was in love with a younger woman was hard, but not as hard as learning he’d fallen out of love with herself. She saw it in his eyes many years ago, when Maddox and Elisha were still in high school. Brian stopped kissing her. He stopped touching her. He stopped planning their anniversaries. He simply stopped loving her, and there was nothing she could do about it. Whatever vows he'd made at the altar, he'd broken them. 

Angie didn’t know what triggered his change of heart, but she knew it wasn’t the new girlfriend of his. It wasn’t Laura’s fault. That 27-year-old brunette was nothing more than a fling in Brian’s life. Or that was what Angie wanted to think. Brian had stopped loving Angie long before Laura came into his life.

Angie looks at the empty glass and sighs. This is the third champagne bottle gone dry, and it only took two hours. Her head feels heavy and she can barely rise from the chair.

The strong bitter taste of champagne lingers on her tongue, a sharp reminder of the loneliness she feels. But nothing comes stronger than the sudden wave of wooziness, which attacks her vision as well, causing the room to spin in a blurry swirl of shapes and colors.

She grabs the edge of the table to steady herself but accidentally shoves the glass off the table. It shatters on the floor. Gasping, Angie stoops to clean up the mess and pauses when she realizes what just happened. 

Suddenly, she’s crouched in a corner of the dining room, sobbing into her knees. Her marriage is really over. It ended long before Brian walked out on her. 

The sparkly mess sits scattered in a pool of glass a couple feet away. Like the crystal glass, her marriage was once so strong and beautiful, often admired by others. But now, the glass is broken. All that’s left of it is a memory of its beauty. The pieces glint like tear drops under the dim yellow glow of the flickering light bulb, a beautiful disaster.