She was a beauty, that Shelly. It even pains me to think right now that she’s my ex girlfriend.

We had been solid since tenth grade. She liked the tortured writer thing I had going on. I was headed to the West Coast to find myself; she was applying to every major university out there she could find. In the end, she settled for a small school. I landed a low paying entry level job at a newspaper close to campus. We were grown-ups, living together and getting on with our lives.

The end of the relationship began when real life set in. Bills and housework and deadlines put a damper on our romantic notions of living in poverty and taking the world by storm. She found out the campus was running over with brainy beauty queens. Suddenly, she was no longer the belle of the ball. She also figured out that tortured writers have terrible mood swings.

One cold night in February the bottom fell out. She was up late with a paper that was giving her grief; an experience she never had in high school. I was in the tiny kitchen of our apartment trying unsuccessfully to come up with an interesting angle on an article about a sanitation workers’ strike. My nerves were on edge. All she wanted to do was talk, and talk some more.

My patience was paper thin. I was a writer, a real-life professional whose career was quickly going down the drain. She was merely a student in a freshman composition class. Her writer’s block could spell only the drama of an average grade. Mine, I succinctly pointed out, could mean the loss of our only source of income; and the end of a promising career in this self-made man.

Somehow, she didn’t appreciate my assessment of her plight.

“As a symbolic gesture to end our relationship she swaggered back into our bedroom and tossed every belonging of mine she could find into a pile in the tub.”

Squeezing the last ounce of her apple scented shampoo on top; she turned the faucet on full blast, gathered her things and walked out of my life. I didn’t discover the mess until citrus scented suds flooded the apartment.

Interestingly, that break up didn’t leave me a broken man. For weeks, the heartbreak and angst drove me to write like a mad man. My career was the better for it, though I doubt that was the effect she planned. The worst part is that, to this day, I cannot bear the smell of apples.

-S.D. Lee, age 36, writer

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