A Chance

            They ask me what I’d change. You know, if I had a second chance. If I could do it all again, they’d say. I shrug. I shrug, and I say, “Doesn’t matter.” “Doesn’t matter,” I say, “no such thing as a second chance.”

             I gave him one more chance. Just one. “Don’t screw it up,” I said. He was on his knees, hugging my torso, crying. Pathetically whispering how sorry he was. And I bought it too. Can you believe it?
             I hadn’t packed his things then, I had waited. I suppose a part of me never really expected him to leave. I didn’t know I wanted him to yet. We had been together for so long, years. Without him, well, I wasn’t me.
             But that was just it. That’s what he had me thinking. I was so caught up in us, that I forgot there was an I.
             He moved back in that night.
             Something happened.
             He was gone the next morning.

             His first chance: One night I came home early. The door was open. He was there, music blasting. Empty beer cans littered the floor. I wasn’t surprised about that.
             I went into the kitchen and pulled a garbage bag from under the sink. I started to pick up the cans. Then I noticed it. Lying, strewn across the arm of a chair. Pink. It was a bra.
            It wasn’t mine.
            I dropped the bag. I put my hand to my mouth, and then I looked down the hall and to the closed door of my bedroom. Our bedroom. I walked slowly, holding my mouth, fighting back tears. When I reached the door I paused with my hand on the knob. The music pounded ferociously in my head. I turned the knob.
            They didn’t notice me at first. I could see her back arched in my direction, sweaty. Slowly his hand crept into sight, caressing her slender torso. She threw her head back and moaned with deep, satisfying pleasure. That’s when she saw me.
            She opened her eyes wide and yelled out. He, startled by the collapse of his building climax, barked in anger. She quickly covered herself with the sheet, and he stood, turning off the music, to confront me, naked.
            Quivering, I spoke. “In our house? In our room?”
            Drunk, disgruntled, and confused, he responded, yelling, “Well Jesus Gloria, what’d’ya expect? You weren’t even comin’ home for ‘nother hour!”
            That’s when I told him. For the first time. For what should have been the last time. I told him to get out.
            “Out. Get out. Get out! GET OUT!”
             He left. I didn’t see him again for a month. And then, one night, he showed up. He begged me to take him back. He was on his knees. Telling me how beautiful I was, how much he loved me. And I gave him what he wanted. I gave him what wasn’t to me to give.

            You can’t change the past. I mean, just think about it, the past. It got that way by already having taken place. If it could be changed, well, then, it wouldn’t have happened.           
            That’s the problem then, isn’t it? Change. People think of it all wrong. There is no such thing as retroactive change. Change is a concept for the future. When you try to change the past, you only make things worse. When you let yourself relive the past, well, you’re simply making it your future.

            His first chance (again): He moved back in that night. He brought beer, of course. I didn’t feel like drinking. He did.
            I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to start a fight on the eve of our reconciliation. So, as I said, I didn’t say anything.
            It wasn’t long before he spoke up. Said what he was thinking. Said what he was really thinking.
           “You coulda been more understandin’, babe.”
           “Understanding?” I was done being quiet.
            Despite his state, he managed to pick up on my defiance. “Yah Gloria, understandin’!"
           “You were fucking in our home! You were fucking someone else David, don’t you understand how serious this is?”
            He looked at me bewildered by my tears. And I realized. It was clear. It was obvious. It wasn’t a chance I was giving him. It was an excuse.
            “You have to go,” I said. He yelled some more, grabbed his beer, and he was gone.

             Things don’t happen a second time around. But, rather, they stay, unchanging, stagnant. They stay, that is, until they’re changed. And then they’re something else.

They ask me what I’d change, and they ask me what I’d do. And my answers don’t satisfy them. And they don’t ever understand. There is no second chance. Just a chance to change. And you either do, or continue not to. I did.

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A guy