I was awakened at 6:30 this morning to the sound of someone screaming. Alright, that's not quite true. I was awakened by a full bladder, but when I arrived in the bathroom, I heard the vocal sounds of anguish through the bathroom window.
Every once in a while, late at night or early in the morning, I wake up and hear screaming. Generally, I go out onto my boat deck and see what I can see. I can never see anything, but it usually sounds like it's coming from the next street over so I go back inside and go back to bed (I know, I'm not exactly superman). But today, the sound was definitely coming from my front street. It sounded like someone was getting murdered.
Downstairs, the screaming was louder. I opened the front door. It sounded like it was right outside. I opened the porch door, and there she was, a tiny, distraught woman, folded up in a ball and crying in the middle of the sidewalk about 3 houses down.
I couldn't tell at this point why she was so upset, but, fearing for our collective safety, I glanced around for a weapon or a cellphone and realized that there was nothing in the hallway to serve me*. So, I just went outside, leaving both the front and porch doors wide open in the hopes that this would somehow save me from whatever was out there.
I approached the distraught woman.
Me: "Hun, what's wrong?"
Distraught Woman: "He doesn't love me anymore!"
ah. Alright, not my area of expertise. I persevered.
Me: "Did he hurt you?"
DW: "He hurt me emotionally! He hurt me financially! Oh God!"
I had come out expecting to break up some sort of domestic abuse case**, but instead I was viewing the aftermath of a lover's quarrel. In my experience, heart break is something that strangers can't generally cure. Especially if the broken heart in question belongs to someone wreaking so strongly of so many different substances, it is doubtful she will remember being comforted by anyone in the end. But then, I couldn't leave a woman all alone crying on the pavement outside of our house. So I patted her back and told her it would be okay***.
DW sobbed for a few more minutes and explained to me why he didn't care and how she knew he didn't care and how this made her feel. Then the heart breaker showed up. He came out of a yard 5 houses down to the north of my place. DW and I were crouched on the pavement 3 houses up, south of my place.
I pointed to him "Is that him?"
DW: "YES!"
Me (still trying to see if there is any sort of physical help this woman needs): "Did he throw you out?"
DW: "He threw us all out! He threw everything out! He threw out us!"
And then, DW started yelling at the heart breaker, yelling at the tops of her lungs, "You don't love me, you can't do this, you ****** just leave just leave, he never cared ****** was never there when I needed him", etc etc, speaking half to him and half to me and half to no one in particular. I patted her in a more urgent matter and whispered "sh sh, it will be okay, sh, it'll be fine". By now I had completely abandoned my original goal of comforting DW, and was just trying to get her to shut up.
Heart Breaker got on his bicycle and rode up to us. He stopped three houses away from us. He stopped right beside my front gate.
So, picture this scene, if you will: a woman, in purple leopard print bustier and skinny jeans, crumpled on the sidewalk, sobbing; a sleepy girl with bedhead wearing light blue pajamas covered in little pink turtles that say "slow to bed...early to rise" all over them, crouched on the pavement beside the crying woman; a man, dressed in black, perched on his bicycle like Zorro on Tornado a few meters from the two women. The woman is yelling, the girl is patting the woman's back nervously, and the man is speaking calmly in a low voice that probably won't wake the neighbours. Which one of these people should probably get up and go mind her own business in her nice warm bed?
I stood up.
HB: "Stay the f*** on street, you f****** b***." Was he talking to me? I sat down again.
DW: "You stay on the street, you dirt, you dirt, you treat me like dirt."
I stood up again.
HB: "Don't come near me, you s***!" Who me? I sat down again.
DW: "You don't come near me! You leave me alone! You leave me you don't care you don't care!"
I stood up again, and started walking towards my house and HB.
Me: "Um, I'm just going inside, if that's okay. I was just...making sure she was okay..."
HB: "Yeah, sorry about all this. Go ahead."
And so, I went inside and locked the door, safe in the knowledge that I had once again managed to remain completely useless to the screaming people who live on my street.
*in retrospect, there were actually several pointy umbrellas I could have used. Or I could have gotten the hammer-on-a-chain together and brought that with me. Unfortunately, that particular weapon of self-defense does not exist yet, though many friends encourage me to make it. Some day...
**And by 'break up' I mean, call the police and hide somewhere until it's all over.
***Emptier words were never spoken. This is why I hate comforting. 'Comforting' is code for 'tell them all sorts of nice things that no woman in her right mind would ever actually believe'. I used to try to be truthful when comforting people, until I told a heartbroken friend of mine that her idiotic ex was never coming back and that was probably a good thing. While I was right--he didn't, and it was--my friend reprimanded me severely for telling her such a horrible thing, and it sort of ruined her crying session for the day. Ah, emotions. Terrible, irrational things they are. I think I may have missed the chapter on empathy in my Being a Human handbook.
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