"Here's to Me... and F*ck Robert!" | Writing Prompt #20

Often, the things we believe about ourselves and reality are two different things

I used to say my late friend Dena had a “cultivated image.” She was a free-spirited, eclectic, artsy eccentric, and it was important that everyone see her just that way. And for a minute during our friendship, that’s exactly what I saw.

But only for a minute.

Dena was desperately in love with a married man named Robert. They’d been having an affair for over twenty years. She’d moved about an hour away from him in hopes of making the affair easier to end, but she was still hooked, and things were still messy.

We’d gather in Dena’s quaint kitchen, with its antique stove and its walls papered with old cookbook recipes, and I would listen to her endless litanies of Robert’s misdeeds. It got to a point where I no longer knew what to say, so I started answering with a shrug and a joking, “I think we should have him killed.”

One day, frustrated with my auto-response, Dena scowled at me. “Are you totally over my drama?”

I was. So I told the truth.

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With hope and love,

Karen