A Beautiful Mess – Short Story
is Dedicated to Hurt hearts.
”Tick tock!” the alarm clanged.
”Dang! I should wake up and go to work!” – Still sleepy, Valery moved her body unwillingly from the beat.
She was brushing her teeth when the phone rang.
”How come? Who calls on this time?” – Valery ran fast to answer the phone.
“Good Morning, my dear daughter! How are you?” a tender voice asked gently.
“Well, Mom, I am preparing to go shopping,” replied Valery.
“Okay, my girl, I will go on a trip for three days,” told the confident mom’s voice.
“What? When did you decide that? Where will you go?” the girl was surprised.
“Well, I will go to Turkey. I have not visited Istanbul for nine years.”, said the woman.
“But mom, what about our shopping schedule?” asked Valery
”You can go on your own. Your age is enough.” the mother hung up.
“Wow, my mother is great” – thought Valery while putting the phone aside.
**********
For a few moments, a slowed flashback showed in her mind.
Two years ago, she washed her teeth with Steven.
When both lovers met, there was love at first sight.
Steven and Valery had a great passion and chemistry. These feelings made them steamy and hot in love-making.
Everything started to fade away when she moved in with him.
At first, he went almost every day with his friends, leaving her alone at home, and not spending quality time with her as a couple. Following some heated arguments, Steven started to sit with her at home.
After a few years of living together and sharing nothing more than a physical connection, their relationship fell apart. Valery started doing her things in life, and so did Steven. Their lives became parallel, transforming both partners into roommates.
Their connection broke so deep that there was nothing more to save in their relationship.
Scandals between the partners took over their talks and broke their homes after thirteen years of life together.
After the breakup, Steven went back to his alcoholic dependence, and Valery stood in a deep depression for one year.
At the end of the toxic relationship between Steven and Valery, the girl went to psychotherapy. The old-dreamed life being together between both partners, accompanied by physical and verbal abuse, couldn’t be easily forgotten.
When Valery’s mind was clear from the relationship nightmare, she felt so lonely that she went into many one-night stands. The arms of many men who didn’t treasure her much seemed so natural.
*********
After finishing her morning beauty ritual, Valery drank a coffee and decided to go first to the Mall. She thought of going to Istanbul later tonight to be with her mom. They did not spend much time together. When on holiday, Valery wanted to stay with her family.
When Valery came into Chrismas’s decorated Mall, she felt weird. Looking at the happy shopping people, she felt alone. The girl spotted a young couple with a pregnant woman. The man sat carefully and close to his girlfriend.
Valery’s tears started to fall from her eyes, and she put on her sunglasses. It didn’t matter she was in the Mall. The girl felt embarrassed, crying in front of other people.
********
She remembered her last lover. He was her soulmate. They had a deep connection in their emotions and souls.
“It is a well-known fact when people meet their soulmate, the Universe takes it away from them,” thought Valery.
Her soulmate, who she loved very deeply, choose another girl – a one-night stand that got pregnant.
When a child is in the love picture, nothing can be changed. Men always choose the mothers of their children, leaving their lovers heartbroken, and in tears.
Usually, when people meet true love, it’s one-sided and turns the person’s life upside down. Valery couldn’t overcome the loss she felt and couldn’t let her unrequited love go.
But the girl should do it, and move on because it was never wise for her to stay in the same place for a long time. It doesn’t matter how much it hurts to get by.
Life’s circle is to die and be reborn.
“Sorry, I break your heart, but I do not love you,” Valery’s last love flame told her after a few months of devotion and passionate romance.
At that moment she felt a combination of anger, sadness, pain, nostalgia, emptiness, indifference, and powerlessness. She went down life’s rabbit hole. Valery’s world fell apart and her heart has torn from the inside out. Literally.
It was funny how a shared and passionate connection went from the greatest experience in the world to the worst hole of depression and confusion.
Valery watched the man, hearing out the tummy of her pregnant girl, and cried with silent tears. She wished to be in the place of the pregnant woman, with a different man, but that would be another “Just a dream” story.
She loved love stories so much, but hers never finished with a happy ending. Probably in the future day, that could happen to her.
It was so disappointing she stopped believing in any form of love and attraction. But today, that story with her soulmate became just a memory of two months ago.
The four months together with her foreign soulmate were a great experience for many new things. In the end, they seemed to be fake.
Valery gave everything she had into that relationship.
“Yack! I do not want to think about that, and I should cry only in private,” Valery went into the bathroom, making up her face to be perfect and without any tears traces.
After all, women always should look good in their appearance, even if they fall deep into depression.
No one should understand, and the makeup should be ideal.
“There will not be someone to catch you when you fall now,” thought the girl.
After Valery strengthened herself, she continued to take a silent walk in the Mall. It was filled with many people who had various stories she could relate to and did not.
*****
The shining shops created illusions people live the best life they have.
But the truth was a bit different if persons wanted to think, but they, and Valery too, ran away from that complex process.
Coffee. It was her favorite place. There she saw two girls cry together.
Valery ordered a “Latte Macchiato” and sat next to the girl’s table. Unfortunately, she heard a weird conversation.
“He used me all the time. I trusted him because he always looked at me, talking only with me. In the end, he said that he reconciles with his girlfriend, who doesn’t like,” cried the girl
“Well, he used you like an emotional trash bin. He flirted with you because he had problems with his girlfriend,” said the other girl.
“Wow, men are so similar,” thought Valery while taking a sip from her coffee.
“I thought I was the only one used as an emotional recycle bin when he had problems with his love life,” Valery put down the coffee cup on her table.
Two years ago, Valery met online a very bold and handsome man who she fell for deeply. He had a unique, powerful, and individualistic character that made many women go after him, and most men envied him. The girl fell for him too. She rarely met brave, individualistic, and clever men.
Valery looked for a more powerful man than herself when she dated. Or she thought so about these men.
In the end, she was the powerful force that drove every single relationship of hers. It was always exhausting and tiring when Valery fought alone for her love till the bitter end.
In the case of her two-years-old love story, she was the trusted person that knew everything about a man who swore he was not in a relationship.
But one night, when that person opened up to talk, she understood he was in a relationship, crying alone for a woman that left him alone.
In the end, they came back together, and that, sarcastically, was a funny situation. With other lies Valery heard from that ex-crush, she thought there was nothing more to surprise her in the communication between men and women.
There was always something more of friendship between Valery and her want-to-be lover two years ago. The flirt flew in the air, and people thought she was his date. It would be good if it was a romance like that.
But, it was simply a mutual use of each each-other current and painful situation.
He never did a single step toward her, using the words: “I have a girlfriend, and I do not need your jealousy.” That man came continuously to Valery because he was physically attracted to her.
At the end of their story, that crush finally stopped that uncertain circle between “I want you, but I can’t come to you,” and reconnected with his unloved girlfriend.
Since then, Valery checked him regularly to see if he was still unclear about what he wanted from the women in his life.
“People generally know what they want, but when the steps are not easy or comfortable, they sit, do nothing, and wait for things to happen somehow. That is not the right way to fight for what you want”, thought Valery, finishing her coffee.
“Now it’s time for me to go far away from that well-known lying and flirting story”- she stood up and went outside the Mall.
*****
It was 5 pm. There was enough time for Valery to go to Istanbul and see her mother.
“Mom, I come to you in Istanbul,” Valery called her mother.
“Okay, baby. I will wait for you in the hotel “B&B”,” the woman was happy to hear that.
Sitting on the bus, Valery had read Elif Shafak’s “The bastard of Istanbul.” It was one of her favorite books which were close to her mind and life’s views.
When she came to Istanbul, she went straight into the hotel where was her mom. Before going to her room, she saw a couple in the lobby bar.
The couple seemed nervous as they met for the first time or had a meeting for a one-night stand adventure.
How often were the one-night stands in Istanbul that no one knew?
The truth was shocking – the local men always wanted to sleep with a foreign woman. It was something like their bragging right, doing the same old sexual thing with a different partner.
A year ago, Valery also was in a similar situation as the young couple she saw.
********
There was a man – bold, handsome and straightforward. He caught her attention with his self-confident walking and talking style. The man bought Valery a rose and wine, so he started to speak with her.
The gentleman came to her first – exactly going like a hunter to his prey. It was on the yacht in Istanbul, when she traveled one year ago.
Valery was trying to overcome her last breakup, and as many other people do, she went straight into the arms of a stranger that gave her comfort for just one night. It was an intoxicating experience at that current moment. Short-term resolution of a long unhealed problem and an illusion that gave happiness for a few hours.
Valery went into depression after that situation. Right said the one-night stands were not her thing. The girl felt used physically and emotionally because she fell for that man. He was a great and experienced player with women’s feelings and hearts.
Unfortunately, most men are like that, and Valey witnessed she was right about her opinion.
The woman glanced again at the couple in the “B&B” hotel. It’s amazing how people become animals when they want to mate physically with other humans.
Is it worth it?
Valery thought that happening it’s a result of personal uncertainty, but men surely thought differently. Not everyone can do it though.
“Men are animals. They are only for visualization, without putting feelings in what they do with a woman,” Valery remembered the words a man she knew, told her. Indeed, the world she lived in it’s going down more with time.
Love was missing, humanity too, and people became more animalistic than animals.
******
But that night, when she was in Istanbul to stay with her mother, drinking more than usual, the girl realized the truth about her current life in every field.
It was the time to let go of all the old feelings and fantastic male images in her head. The truth was only one – her true right to live as the best version of herself, alone, without going after people who did not care about her, but themselves.
After the bottle of wine, Valery continued to drink in the lobby, watching the young couple check for a hotel room.
Some hotel lobby men who wanted to sleep with Valery did not do a single step toward her because of their fear of rejection.
Then, Valery saw the current life’s truth: A beautiful mess.
Tears fell from her eyes, and nobody came to comfort her.
The girl moved from the sofa in the hotel’s lobby bar and went to her mother’s room. She hugged her mom tight, without saying a single word.
The mother started crying too because she felt the pain her daughter held for so long. The only true love, realized Valery, is the love between a parent and a child.
“Do not cry, my baby,” the mother hugged tight Valery, “Everything will be good, my girl.”
“But I am a mess, mom, and do not know how I can go on,” cried louder the girl in her mother’s arms.
“Yes, my dear, you are a beautiful mess,” agreed the mother, “But every mishmash clears up with time, and becomes a more beautiful story,” said the wise lady.
On New Year’s Eve, Valery felt strong, inspired, and liberated for the first time in thirteen years. She needed no one to make herself move on proudly and honorably in her life.