Chapter 4: RYDER

I wonder what she's doing. It's only been a day since the interview, and there was no way for me to know how she was holding up since no one in her circle would even spit on me, let alone fill me in, but she'd looked bad, and it was worrying me.

I gave up wondering a long time ago when I'd stop thinking of her and when I'd lose this feeling of missing a limb or something else just as important and necessary to my existence. That's after I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I'd done something horrible in a fit of anger and torn our lives apart.

Something that I could never take back, something that I will regret for the rest of my life. That saying is really true, the one about not knowing what you've got until you've lost it, and my major fuck up had cost me big. I realized it almost immediately, but by then, it was too late. The deed was done for the whole world to see, and there was no turning back.

I wanted to hurt her and ended up shredding my heart to pieces in the process. Now I've slowly been bleeding out ever since, and not having her by my side like the air I need to breathe was finishing the job of slowly killing me. Sometimes I find it very preposterous that I'd done this to myself. Not even my worst enemy could've taken me down this fast and this spectacularly if they tried. I am that other cliché so easily bandied about; I am my own worst enemy.

Now I have to lay in the bed I'd made, rumpled sheets and all. I took a drag from my cigarette but got no pleasure from it. Smoking was just something I'd done when I was younger to look cool, but I had never really had a love for it. Then it became an addiction that I couldn't kick.

I can still hear her scolding me in that sweet southern drawl of hers about the dangers of smoking and what it might do to my golden voice in the future, the voice that had catapulted me onto the world stage before I knew and had the ability to understand the price of fame.

When did I get so old? How had I missed the years in between? And why is it that when I look back, my time with her is the only happiness I find? Not the stardom, not the roaring crowds chanting my name, and not even the millions I had in the bank. The women I'd foolishly messed around with when we were on breaks were now faceless mistakes that I never wished to recall and were just another tool I'd used to hurt her the way I was hurting.

Isn't it odd that the one person who tried to help me was the one I wanted to hurt most? I know now that it was my sick mind, not to mention the recreational drugs I'd dabbled in long before I knew that there were even effects.

When I look back on life now, something I've had plenty of time to do in the last three years, give or take, the only light I see is her. The only voice I hear in my head when I open my eyes in the morning is hers. I can't count how many mornings I woke up with a smile and reached for her, only to realize that she was not there.

Those days are the worst. Days when I awaken as if it was before, when she and I were together, spending every waking moment with each other, laughing, playing, being silly. It wasn't just when the cameras were on either, not like I am now with my wife. What we had was real; it was so real that it sometimes scared me.

We were so young when we fell in love. I think I was a bit starstruck when we first started going together. Who wouldn't be? I'd watched her grow up on television from a young age, way before I got started on my own career, though we were roughly the same age.

I fell in love with her through a television screen, and by the time we met in person, it was like something out of a dream. She didn't know it, no one knew, but it had taken me months to stop pinching myself after we started going together.

Of all the things that I'd achieved up to that point, having her as my girlfriend had to be at the top of my list. She outshone everything else in my life; she'd become the center of my everything. So how did we come to this? How had I let my drug-infused anger lead me to fuck my entire life up so royally? And isn't it some kind of cosmic joke that of all the people around me, she had been the only one trying to get me to clean up my act?

No one else ever even dared. They were too busy kissing my ass for favors, telling me what I wanted to hear while watching me spiral out of control. Now there was no one reining me in. No sweet southern drawl whining at me to do better, to be better, for her and for me. Now I'm a broken ship adrift on the sea with no one there to bail me out.

I knew I was on the fast track to nowhere the day I got married to someone else, someone other than her. I knew even as I said the words through my drug-hazed mind that I would regret it and have every second since, but guilt and pride wouldn't let me accept it. Now, with one look at her, it was all coming back, and this time I don't think there was anywhere for me to hide.

Three years it had been three long years since I'd seen her. And just as long since I've had her on my mind. In fact, she'd been on my mind pretty much since the first morning after my marriage began, but back then, in the beginning, thoughts of her only conjured more thoughts of anger and betrayal.

Between the feelings of betrayal, the constant drugs, and the warm body next to mine that always seemed to be there, I held onto that anger and rage, anything to ignore the hurt that I was feeling.

It wasn't long, though, before I was bombarded with memories of happier times. Memories that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not escape them. I'd convinced myself that I hated her, that my life could go on without her. But I had no idea that that's not the way love works.

I thought I could cut her and the past we shared out of me like a cancer, but it hadn't taken me long to realize that forgetting her would be the equivalent to and just as easy as stopping myself from breathing; impossible.

Now it had taken just that one look, and I realized that I'd been kidding myself all this time. Nothing had changed. I knew it from the moment I first got the call about the interview. The way I'd responded to the news told me everything I needed to know. No matter how hard I'd tried to convince myself, I was not over her, far from it.

The heart palpitations and the obsessive need for the interview to be aired were dead giveaways to what was really going on with me, and the blinders came tumbling off. I'd made myself believe that I was over her, over the love that we once shared. I'd tried to lose myself in my new wife, tried to tell myself that I was happy, truly happy, but to no avail. How could I be happy when half of my heart, the best part, was missing?

I'm pretty sure everyone noticed, including my wife. And no matter how I tried to put on a brave face and keep a smile whenever the cameras were around, I was finding it harder to do. I was barely hanging on by a thread these past few years, but now after seeing her still looking so broken, it was all just crashing down on me.

Maybe if she hadn't hidden herself away for so long like a damn Gotye song, if my life hadn't completely changed with her, not in it, things would be different; I might have been able to go on with my life then. Even with all the backlash from my decision, I could've pulled through if only I'd been able to see her face.

I'd been a fuck up long before this, my young age giving me a free pass with my fans and the rest of the world. But those same people weren't as forgiving of the grown man who'd broken their little angel's heart. The way that I'd done it hadn't won me any favors either, that's for sure.

My once-adoring fans had been split down the middle, and it had been a good year or so before I was able to go back into the studio again to do anything of note. That's because my inspiration was gone. I hadn't realized it at first; after all, I'd been making music long before we met, but it was as if the heart was gone out of me, and I had nothing of substance to offer.

I'd done my own hiding as well, too afraid to face the reality that I might never be able to do what I used to, what I loved, without her there by my side. I'd had to grow up real fast and had to accept that age was indeed more than a number.

The world that had watched me grow up expected better of me now. I couldn't get away with doing childish bullshit while in the body of a man. They held me accountable for the first time, and it was brutal. Had it not been for the constant counsel of my spiritual advisor, I would've been completely lost.

He's the one who'd gotten me on the right track, something he had been trying to do for years before the catastrophe. But sometimes I doubt even him, and though I've never said it out loud, deep down inside, I sometimes think that he has no idea what he's talking about. Like a drug, it feels good going in, but the aftereffects are always dismal.

Some of his advice had been against everything I believed, but I always knew that he knew better, that he had only my best interest at heart. It was he who had helped me get my head together when all I wanted to do was to end it, end everything and just fade away.

I looked down at my phone where I'd stolen an image of her from the interview, studying her face once again, seeing the pain and the hurt that was still there, and feeling my guts being ripped out all over again. I rubbed my thumb over her beautiful face and felt a tear in my heart as I fought back tears. "I'm so sorry, baby."

I started to close my eyes to escape the trauma, but I felt my wife Janie's presence before I watched her come into the room, and the guilt beat away at my temples. Here I was with this beautiful woman who would move heaven and earth to please me, and my mind was on someone else.

As always, when I look at her, I feel nothing. I've tried time and again to make sense of the situation, have even tried forcing myself to feel something, anything for her at all except antipathy. Yes, along with the guilt I feel for using her, there's hate. I hate her for being here when the one I truly want isn't. I hate her for being the instrument I'd used to hurt my love.