I hate goodbyes.

She sat on the edge of the sidewalk, waiting for the Uber to take her home. She had her suitcase beside her. Her face was stone, chiseled to perfection in a never-ending frown. "I hate you," her frown said. "With all my heart, I hate you, I hate you."

Her chin held high, pretending confidence. Inside, she was destroyed; on the outside, she was a strong, independent young woman. "You can't break me," her dignified chin said. "You can't bring me down—you're just a man I used to know." 

The tree on my front lawn waved in the wind, its leaves escaping the clutches of the branches each time the air howled. No fruit bared ripe on that tree. The tree lost weight, becoming skinnier and skinnier as it arched from the gusts, and its dress of leaves shed from its bare back.

I stood on the street. I yelled at her. I wanted her to stay. But I called her stupid for accusing me. I tried to make her want me, and that made her only want me less. I threw up my hands and waved them like I was fending off a bear. She and I were no longer friends, so why was I even trying? This battle was lost, and so was the war.

The worst phrase escaped her mouth the moment the headlights of the Uber flashed over her delectable face. She lifted her eyes to me finally, standing to her feet, holding the handles of her two fat suitcases in each hand. She said:

"I will forget you." 

Those four words shut me up. I lowered my hands to my waste, and simply stood there in the street, completely in lack of a defense. I had lost the girl who had changed my life. She was my first, and she was the beginning to the rest of my romantic timeline. I was in for a long year of missing her. 

That Uber stopped an inch beside me. I thought it might have even bumped the side of my knee. I wish it had run me over. Then maybe she'd drop her bags and forget all of our fighting. If I was on the asphalt, lying in a pool of my own blood on the street, maybe then she would remember how much she loved me.

But instead, I watched her roll her suitcases to the Uber's trunk, as a kind Indian driver helped her hoist her luggage into the compartment and slammed the trunk door closed. The Indian driver walked back to the driver's seat, and nodded to me with a huge smile, probably thinking I was this girl's boyfriend. He had it backwards, I was now the enemy.

She and the driver slammed their doors shut. The driver gave me a little beep-beep from the horn to motion me off the street and onto the sidewalk. He was unpleasantly surprised when I turned his smile upside-down with the up end of my middle finger. 

But I walked onto the sidewalk like a ghost. Passive and unloved. I might have done this to myself. I might be the root cause to my destruction.

The car traveled away, and as I stared at the head of my love, her head never looked back. My shirt rippled like a flag in the wind. The night grew darker and darker as the headlights of the Uber swept further away. Darker and darker the world became, until the car reached the end of street, and turned the corner, before the light shut me out. The blackness shrouded me.

Loneliness took its toll.