Rebecca was a slightly overweight girl I knew with blue eyes and a beautiful soul who lived in her own apartment complex on the shores of a muddy Michigan river. We had been fuk friends on and off for a while. She reminded me of a chubby version of Meg Ryan. She always welcomed me into her warm clean apartment with her fuzzy orange cat named Fred.

Fred liked me. She found that strange. She use to tell me how Fred hated most men that would come into her dwelling. I would only show up or call her when I was all wasted, and out of any other options for a night of vagina diving.. I was a self absorbed asshole.

Rebecca and me would sometimes have hot passionate sex, never finishing the movie we would rent. We would get about half way through a movie and after many drinks and bong tokes we would both start blabbering about our lives and how unfair the world was to us. We were both creative pessimists with a morbid sense of humor. Plus we were both horny freaks, that had already had sex, so I think we felt safe with each other, even if we had screwed other people since the last time we hung out.

Rebecca liked to paint in water colors. She had a collection of paintings. All her paintings were of elephants. All sorts of different body shaped/ sized/ elephants, and different colored elephants. Some of the elephants took on human features in some of her paintings. Really odd twisted shit, some of it was. Elephants with baby heads engaged in sexual acts with older people. I never asked her about her elephant trip too much, cause she was really touchy about any questions regarding her paintings. I always use to tell her if I was a painter, which I wasn’t at the time, that I would paint a collection of different monkeys.

This always made her laugh, and she would ask me, why monkeys?

And I would say, why elephants?

Rebecca was almost done with her schooling to become a nurse. Soon, she always told me, she wouldn’t be poor anymore, that she would be making a high salary figure. I was still a pizza delivery driver who had majored in about 10 different subjects in junior college and still didn’t know what I was suppose to be. The thing I liked about Rebecca is she never judged me or made fun of me for being a full time slacker druggie. She just accepted me for who I was, and not what she wanted me to be, like most women tend to do after you start dating them. She was one of the only women I knew who didn’t give a shit about where I worked, or my lack of goals, or lack of financial future.

She was constantly trying to diet and was always paranoid about her looks and weight, maybe that’s what I really dug about her. Cause I was always self conscious myself, about myself, and what I looked like and who I was suppose to be. I felt relaxed with her, like I didn’t have to put up a front, I could just be myself and my many faces could just come out, whatever substance or mood I was in.

I would always tell her that her figure was just fine, and that she looked perfect. She would tell me I was full of shit. But I would tell her that I really meant it, and give her a warm smile, and gently caress her rosy white cheeks, wiping any tears away from her manic mind. Then we would usually fuck for hours. (make love?)

I always wanted her to cum first, and she always wanted me to cum first. I guess thinking back about all this, maybe we really loved each other. I’m not sure. Every time she got to personal about me or my soul or why I didn’t want to commit to her, I would clam up, and just split, leaving her crying, naked on her bed, with Fred to lick her tears away.

I don’t know why I didn’t fully commit myself to fall in love with Rebecca. I mean shit. I was dumb and young, thinking life would last forever, thinking tons more opportunities would arise for maybe different women to choose from. I was young and selfish, and scared to commit my love and soul to a woman who I knew would always be faithful and love me till the end of time. What can I say? I had been fucked over by another women, my first love, and I had serious trust issues… Now I’m in my 30’s, haven’t been laid in years, and don’t even know how to talk to women any more, let alone hang out with them or stick my weener in them.

I guess you might be wondering what ever happened to Rebecca?

Well. Guess I will finish this little story for all my invisible readers.

I used to have a friend named Bryan,. Who went a little crazy from taking one too many acid tabs back in the 90’s. He tried to strangle his girlfriend to death one night after making her dress up in a leather chicken suit in the middle of a Michigan snow storm in the back of his parent’s woods.

So the story goes. After his girlfriend finally dropped charges and got a restraining order against him. They let him out of the loony bin. I can’t believe he didn’t get any jail time. But he must have tricked all the shrinks into thinking he was fine. Bryan was a psychopath, and I always knew it, he wasn’t my first psychopath friend.

When he first got out, I tried to stay away from him, but he tracked me down, and we eventually started hanging out again playing music, and dropping acid, and smoking weed, and drinking ourselves into insanity.

I made the mistake one night of taking him over to Rebecca’s. And I noticed right away she seemed like she was into him. Maybe I should have warned her about his past. Maybe I should have put my foot down and stopped what I knew was going to happen. But I couldn’t. Me and Rebecca were not dating. We were just fuck friends?

When I saw them hitting it off, I just sort of freaked, and decided to split. Pushing Fred off my lap. I drove drunk all the way to Lansing to score heroin and crack. My only true loves.

Fuck Rebecca. She didn’t love me, acting all flirty with Bryan like that. And fuck Bryan too, he was no friend. I was going nutty on my own self pity trip.

A big shot of heroin gets rid of all that nonsense worry. Fuck them both. They can have each other.

I ended up moving into this house full of scabby filled heroin crack junkies in down town Lansing. I stole for money. I mooched and told lies for money. I did whatever I had to do to get a fix. Losing 80 pounds in 3 months. I was on a permanent death wish high, yet still, some days, I thought of Rebecca’s beautiful smile, I thought of her grandiose hips and tight little box of love.

One day after being beaten up by a bunch of black gangster dealers I owed money to, and almost at the point of death, after drinking a keg and shooting what seemed like an ounce of coke, I broke down and called my father, crying, whacked out of my mind from being up for a week on crack and heroin, a never ending cycle of certain death..

“Dad? Fuck. I’m so sorry your only son is a loser. I’m going to kill myself tonight, I can’t take this shit anymore, my mind is going in circles that lead to just the same circle. I’m sorry dad, I’m a total fuck up.. And and…”

He interrupted my little girly druggie crying fit…

“Son, come home, we will get you some help, don’t give up on life, just come on home…” he said, even sounding gulpy himself.

“Thanks dad, I love you” I said. For one of the first times in my life, tears rolling down my face, thinking of Rebecca and an early grave, crazed out of my skull because of my nonstop drug trip death wish thing I was doing with soulless zombie people.

I felt pretty fucking gay and stupid the next day when I woke up out of my depressed drunken drugged out haze of self pity, and in a flash it all came back to me. I started packing my things to move back in with my tortured parents. I was a nightmare son. The complete reason why people should never have kids.

One thing that got me in a happier mood while driving back to the muddy river city was thinking of visiting Rebecca when I got home. I didn’t care if Bryan was dating her. As long as they were happy and in love. And as long as he treated her with the respect she should be treated with. I couldn’t give her my heart or my love, so maybe my psychopath so called friend Bryan had filled in for me and made her happy.

Soon as I walked in my parent’s door, my mother had a newspaper in her hand, shoving it in my panicky junkie face.

“Weren’t you friends with this Bryan guy?” she questioned

The front headlines read….

“Muddy river girl found dead, suicide or homicide?”

“What the fuck mom.”

I said, grabbing the newspaper off her.

Going back into my old room to try and relax and read about this shit.

It said Rebecca was found with her throat slit laying naked, surrounded by all her elephant paintings in a pool of her own blood, that her boyfriend, Bryan, claimed he found her like that, and that it was a suicide.

I got this empty sad feeling in my gut, and almost left my body, thinking it wasn’t real. That this was some twisted movie like me and Rebecca use to watch. One that we would never finish. Tears wanted to form, but they didn’t.

The police had Bryan locked up while the investigation took place. Months went by. I even drove by her old apartment, but there was police tape all over the scene. I cried a lot and wanted to talk to Bryan to see what had really happened to a girl I should have loved. But he was in lock down until the investigation was finished. It was huge headlines for months in the small Michigan town. I remember crying a lot going to rehab again, and stupid NA meetings. I also wondered about Fred. Rebecca loved Fred and she wouldn’t want Fred to suffer ever.

I even remember one night after we made love, she started in on one of her new elephant paintings, and while she painted it, while I sucked away on a bong, she said something about her daddy touching her when she was young, then she quickly changed the subject, brushing into the new elephant… and with her sad blue eyes, turned to me, asking me that if anything ever happened to her, if I would take care of Fred.

I was sort of freaked out by the entire display of crazy emotion. But I too shed a tear, and said “ Of course I would take care of Fred.”

So I got lucky driving around all day one day in a total panic after getting out of another useless rehab….searching for Fred… and finding him on the day of his execution at a pound, and rescued him from the gas chamber, or however they kill animals these days.

Fred meowed at me, thanking me, the entire drive back to my folks. Fred was a good cat man. And Rebecca. Well. She may have been my soul mate I threw away. And a grown man cries again.

I tried to get some of Rebecca’s’ elephant paintings off her grieving mother, but she wouldn’t even return my phone calls. Her possibly molesting father had died of alcohol problems years before.

I got totally sober for a while and was starting to get my life back on track when I read in the paper one day that Bryan had been released from jail for lack of evidence. Half the town wanted him dead, me especially.

But that grimy motherfuckin psychopath split town without ever having to answer my questions. I knew that fucking jerk did it. & sometimes, late at night, when I stare into Fred’s eyes. I can see Rebecca’s tears as she rides bloody elephants through dreams worlds of what may be an afterlife.

Nicolas R. Morgan is a native of California living in Texas.