text: “Everything is changing, I really mean it this time.” She was looking at me with that spark in her eyes she always had when she assumed a new persona. This time, it was some sort of 80’s glam metal retro look. She’d grown out her hair like Bon Jovi and started wearing a ratty torn-up white muscle shirt that showed off those goddamn biceps I could never break free from. “From now on, everything will be about you, babe,” She had a pleading, hopeful tone to her voice. She really believed in herself. Then again, she always did. I just smiled and looked away, thinking about how many times she’d said that. all superstars are like that I suppose. Always changing, adapting, evolving. I think the one thing that never changes is that they never stay the same. “You mean everything, Ava?” “I’m past giving up on you. I need you more than anything, and I’m not throwing our love away this time. Please baby,” She reached in to grab my hand, her rough calloused fingers weaving their way around mine. “Stay with me.” Damn it, why is she so good at this? I fall for it every time, but god when she talks like that, it’s like I can see her heart. I can feel how genuine she is, and all I want is to reach in and touch her again. It’s like I’m her fucking dog, always coming back whenever she says my name. But I just can't help it. Jesus Christ, if she were an ocean, I’d drown in her every day she graced the shore. “I’ve never left,” I bit my lip, my stomach filling with the nervous pit it always did when I came back to her. At this point, it's more fear than excitement. But still, I hope. Still, I feel like she’s changed this time, that she's gonna make good this time. Her blue eyes spark even brighter, and she shone that smile that consumed your entire being in a flood of euphoria. “You’ve always known how to make me the happiest girl on earth,” she said, practically wrapping my heart in linen lace, and binding me even closer to her. “You’d better get out there,” I told her. “They're expecting you” She fell into a nervous frenzy as she looked down at the watch on her wrist. “Shit! Your right,” she grabbed the letterman jacket she had laying on her table and ran over to give me a deep, intense kiss before pulling back. “I love you more than anything, Cathy” “I know you do, sweetheart,” I said with a laugh, “I know you do.” She lingered in the doorway for a second, doing a quick scan of me before smiling and running out to the soundcheck. What the hell did I just rope myself into? Sure, those flirty little expressions of hers are fun now, but things will just fall apart. They always somehow fall apart again. I walk over to the little mini fridge in the corner of the room and look inside. There are a couple of bottles of chardonnay that probably cost a couple hundred a pop. I find a glass in a cupboard in the room, and sit back down on the leather couch that I was on earlier She used to drink shit like this all the time. When she had first gotten big, she’d wear these nice, tailored suits. She’d slick back her hair, and go for a real refined butch look. Even on stage, she’d be sipping chardonnay from an ornate crystal glass, which she’d keep perched on the piano. That was the first time she’d cheated on me. To be fair, she had no idea how to handle all the stress of actually keeping up with her image. She was refined on stage, but behind the scenes, she was falling apart. Backstage, she didn’t even bother with the chardonnay, just downing vodka and popping Adderall to try and calm and energize herself, desperately looking for some sort of balance. And so I guess when the piano player tried to reach out to her, and bring her out of that solitude, it was only natural to start spiraling into more intimate ways of comforting each other. It was the piano player who told me the morning after. She was a pretty decent girl, after all. She felt I deserved to know how big of a mistake they’d made, and she was right of course. So I called up Ava and told her I knew. We came to a pretty quick agreement that the relationship wasn’t going to be able to function anymore. So we broke up She had a few phases while we were apart that first time. It was the longest we’d stayed broken up, so I honestly forget some of what they were. I think at one point she wore a lot of leather and had a lot of neon lights, and she might have gone steampunk for a bit too. But I remember what she looked like when she showed up at my door for the first time in close to a year and a half. She had on skinny jeans and a simple white blouse. Her hair was grown out long, and she’d done a full face of makeup. Honestly, she looked straight, which was a little strange to see. She said that she just wasn’t happy without me. All she wanted was to come back to me, to be mine plain and simple. She’d said something pretty similar to what she’d said tonight. That from now on, it would all be for me. Every song, album, and concert would all be to me. And after almost an hour and a half, I said yes. That same cycle would keep repeating for years. She’d cheat on me, we’d break up, then get back together again. I came back to the comfortable leather couch I sat on, the sweet cold taste of the wine rolling into my throat. There’s a feeling. It’s not quite a high, more of a deep contentment, that comes whenever I’m around Ava. When she’s there, every emotion stills. It feels like everything will be alright, like there's this equilibrium. But then she leaves, and you realize how unbalanced being around her is. Maybe it’s something in her cologne, or some way she moves, but she lulls me into a trance. And once she’s left, the hallucination rots away, showing the beautiful decadent world she put me into is built on garbage and rats. I get this sort of pit in my stomach, the realization that I put my all into her again, and that I'm left empty once she’s gone. I put the wine back down on the table with a sigh. I shouldn’t do this again. I’ve been through it enough to know what to expect. I’ve lost money, health, and friends on loving Ava. I need to stop it now before things get bad again. I need to start making choices that sting again, so I can do what's right for both of us. The right thing to do right now would be to leave. To block and erase her number and never see her again. Build a life somewhere else, find someone who can stay devoted to me, and focus on building a life that isn’t centered on someone else. It’s wrong for me to only feel fulfilled, to only have equilibrium when she’s near me. Instead, I get up to go watch her. I don’t want to hurt her, so she at least deserves to hear from me that I can’t stay. After all, I need to be firm and rational, not cruel and cold. And I might as well watch her perform one last time, and enjoy being near her for just a bit longer. It’s not always heartache and pain. I make it to the front row just as the lights go down. People start cheering, and it's a big crowd. They fill out the entire 2000 seats of the theater. A voice starts to introduce the band, and then the lights turn on, illuminating them as they start in on one of their new songs, hard and fast. She’s at the front jumping and singing energetically into the mic. Then after minutes of build-up, she starts into an intense guitar solo, her fingers moving swiftly and deftly across her fender like it’s the natural thing for her to do. The song finally ends with a crash, and the crowd erupts again. She takes a minute to bask in the applause, her arms raised in triumph, that ensnaring smile plastered on her face. She egg’s them on, waving her arms to ask for more when the cheering lulls, greeted with an even louder cacophony of screaming. She’s a performer, after all, it's only natural that she’s good at this, at turning the entire room on. She gets back closer to the mic again and says: “Thank you! I love you all so, so much. But I want to take a little break, and dedicate this next one to my beautiful, kind, long-suffering girlfriend. It’s a slower song, tell me if y’all know High Enough by Damn Yankees” A few scattered bits of cheering came from the audience as one of her bandmates starts in on a soft melody on an acoustic guitar. She starts singing, with her eyes closed and the mic next to her face like it's something holy. God damn, this is going to hurt like hell. I try to distract myself every time she looks towards me in the stands. I awkwardly try to avoid eye contact, looking at anything else other than her. But my heart drops when the music does because I know what's coming. “ Don’t say goodnight, say your gonna stay forever...” her voice drops into an emotional quiver at that last part, and I can’t help but look back up at her. She’s staring right at me, and there's this horrific shining in her glistening blue eyes as she starts in on her guitar. “ Can you take me high enough? To fly me over, yesterday...” She starts in on the chorus, and it physically pains me to feel how much I still love her, each note sending daggers down my spine. I can’t do this again, I can’t let it happen again. She’s too inconsistent. She only relies on emotion, that's the reason I can't break free from her. I can't give in tonight, or we’ll never break this god-forsaken cycle. “ Can you take me high enough? ” it’s that second high note that unravels me. It’s such a pure, unfiltered feeling in her voice that she almost sends us all into tears. I look at her, and I don’t see any of the trouble from the past. All I see is the dorky girl I fell for all those years ago, who smoked too much and played music like the gods delivered it to her. And it was then I knew. She was the Phantom to my Christine, capturing me again in her song, leading me back down into the catacombs of our love. There was no way I could escape from her. Frankly, I didn’t know that I wanted to leave. Change can be great sometimes. But some things can never change.