Revenge Sax, Part I: I'd Rather Die Alone

How I tended to a broken heart by picking up an alto saxophone.

Hey gang,

This piece will be the first of the Revenge Sax series. You’ll get it all to your inbox, of course, but I’m going to be posting about it on my new Instagram page dedicated to Write All Along, which I’d love for you to follow (CLICK HERE!). There will be subpar saxophone playing. There will be stories. There will be obnoxious honking, from both me and the sax. And laughter.

Aside from clips dedicated to the Revenge Sax journey, I’ll be sharing my own writing and other writing that I love.

In case you’re curious, I’ll be keeping my personal Instagram page private during the school year. And ICYMI, I’m teaching college English now, and students would rather ask questions about my personal life than do writing exercises, so I thought it best to begin a page that will remain public no matter what, solely dedicated to writing-adjacent endeavors. I’d like interested parties to be able to connect to my writing, but I think it’s best to put a boundary there as an educator. I will do a jig if you give me a follow.

Anyway—the plan for this series is to unravel the subject of breakups and heartache and recovery as I relearn to play the saxophone—an instrument I quit because my band teacher was a JERK. It’s going to be a whacky time. As always, if you have thoughts to share, feedback, a heartbreak story of your own, I’d love to hear it. You can simply reply to this email or leave it in the comments.

Thanks for still being here. The best thing you can do for an independent creator like me, is share my work—forwarding this to someone is all it takes. If you want to show WAA some love, share with someone you love. And now, the first verse…

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One morning

I woke up

And I knew you were gone…

Crosby, Stills, and Nash hummed in my ears as I stared up at a brilliant blue sky, seated on the stoop of my apartment building—a home that I love. I was still in my pajamas, even though it was probably close to 11 a.m.. The soft cotton of my shirt clung to beads of sweat on my chest in the unseasonably warm spring sun. Anxiety prickled my skin.

How strange, I thought, to be out here like this, sitting on the other side of a force field of agony. I couldn’t go in. I knew what was coming, the change ahead, and I felt the paralysis of grief.

About 12 hours earlier, my relationship of more than three years came to crashing end. He would be moving out of the home we shared. The cold consciousness of heartbreak was ice in my veins, and my heart punched out in a hard and steady beat, not letting me forget, not for a moment.

I’m no stranger to heartbreak. I’ve had four long-term relationships in adulthood, and this one in particular had been resuscitated twice—once came months after his infidelity. But this break is hitting different.

I’m still navigating the aftershock, of course, but I’m simultaneously seeing clearer than I have in years. It feels like someone has lifted the curtain and performed a matinee of truths that I can’t unsee.

The first act was the realization that my willful blindness had reached an all-time high—because of love, yes, but also because of fear. There were times I had thought, I should leave. This relationship is hurting me. But if I leave, who would I be without him? Worse yet, who would I be without a relationship?

I was considering the latter when a response came in like an intuition, similar to what

Laura McKowen

calls the “diamond in your chest”—your personal and sacred knowing, the thing you cling to when uncertainty swirls around you. Louder than the music in my ears, I heard it: you will become exactly who you are meant to be.

It was so clearly stated, it felt like something I had heard before; perhaps a whisper from the corners of my mind that I had once tuned out, in order to sustain the ambitious delusion that my relationship would work out this time.

I stayed for several reasons, and a few of them are related to love, but the most alarming insight is understanding the power that fear held over me. Fear was driving the car, calling the shots, sealing the deal. In the corners of my subconscious, fear wrestled love to the ground and pinned it there for years, perpetually intertwined. When I felt that my relationship was breaking me down, fear told me that I couldn’t survive the turmoil of the alternative.

The alternative is that I would have to face the world as a single, childless 35-year-old woman, with a side of outspoken attitude. A lot of the messaging I absorb begs me to believe that I don’t have much without a traditional family of my own creation; and in my case, I’m simultaneously too much as a direct and candid woman.

The messaging within my relationship also suggested that I should tone it down.

One of those painful truths that I can’t unsee, is that he undeniably wanted me to shrink down into a smaller, less opinionated version of myself; the sad part is that I tried to comply.

And as I puzzled over a way to make it all work, I could see what I was doing, but I would rename it something like compromise to disguise the fact that I was dimming my own light to make an insecure person feel more comfortable.

I did my best to fit all my parts into their respective boxes and keep it as neat as possible: my desire to pour my life onto pages for public consumption, my trauma, my politics, my forgiveness, my feelings about his casual deceit and, worst of all, his infidelity.

There were moments along the way when I could hear a distant alarm.

When I would ask for his opinion on my creative work, I could see a shift in his body language. For reasons I’ll never fully understand, he did not like talking about it.

If I asked him to read something I had written, he would tell me, without fail, “I’m not your target audience.” Who the heck is my target audience, anyway?! I don’t recall a branding meeting, but that wasn’t even the point—I knew in my gut what he was really saying: I don’t support what you’re doing. I’m afraid of what people will think of you and in turn, me. I am choosing to ignore it.

So I retreated. I minimized. I stopped asking. His rejection echoed in my head: the person I share a home with can’t even bear to read my work. I internalized it as my fault and my flaw, and it chipped away another piece of my soul.

It is the most unnatural thing for me, to shrink down like that, and it was a heavy slab of stone upon my chest. Over time, the anxiety grew, and as my first semester of teaching was coming to an end, I had a suffocating feeling—was it me, or was it my relationship? Something felt indisputably…off.

I asked him squarely several times: is anything going on with you? With us? He brushed me off, and assured me with various declarations that all was fine. Until the day I asked for a sign.

On this particular day, my inner-knowing was pleading with me. I remembered the only other time I had been this certain there was something to be uncovered, and that was when he had cheated on me. I had picked up on something invisible to anyone but me—but it was there, and I felt it. I remembered that knowing, and I held on tight.

Head in my hands, fat tears collecting at my chin, I begged the universe to show me what to do. I implored any willing higher power to step in and assist. Show me what to do, and I’ll do it.

That night, he came home drunk and confessed he had been planning his exit for a month.

Sometimes life kicks you in the face, but once you spit out the blood, you realize…you’re awake. And you’re finally paying attention again.

A week later, as I was licking my wounds, I decided to distract myself with grand plans for the future. I knew I’d have at least some free time to fill, and I was considering how I might do that, when I recalled a recent conversation about my adolescent heartbreak over quitting the saxophone.

Starting at just ten years old, I did not take the saxophone seriously, but I did love to play it. I’d often drag it out after dinner to do yet another rendition of my favorite song at the time, “My Heart Will Go On.” Aside from my beloved Nana, my family members would scatter, but I didn’t mind. I experienced a light-heartedness when I played—until I reached middle school, and had band class with Mr. S.

Look—I’m not going to pretend I was a precious angel with exemplary behavior. In fact, I’m certain that I was talkative, despite knowing I wasn’t supposed to talk in class. But I was catching a very heavy hand of discipline for what most teachers considered a simple offense, and it became obvious to me that I was being singled out.

As a certified chatter, I took heat from many teachers over the years, but he handled his interactions with me so poorly, that soon, I decided I couldn’t bear another minute as his student. There was an incident with a music stand that still makes me wince, and that was around the time I decided to quit the band.

My mom reluctantly tucked my alto sax away in the basement, and it feels dramatic to say this about a woodwind, that I never saw my saxophone again, but I thought about it many times.

Including present day, as I considered how I’d fill my precious time.

I went online and crowdsourced some ideas for the best way to get my hands on a sax, and I settled on renting from a local music shop for a very reasonable monthly fee. I picked up my instrument a few days later.

Back at my home, I laid the music case out in front of me. The label read “Jupiter,” and I thought about how he had criticized me for loving astrology, saying I was “too smart” to enjoy such things.

I thought about every time I ingested some mediocre person’s opinion of me and subsequently adjusted how I acted, how I dressed, how I spoke.

As I wedged the mouthpiece onto the long brass neck of the instrument, I made a promise: I am no longer entertaining any other version of myself. This is it. I’m loud, opinionated, and have a tendency to be critical, demanding, and hot-headed. At times, I’ve even been careless and cruel.

But I’ve also been empathetic and understanding and forgiving. My insides are softer than a ripe peach, I love an inappropriate laugh, and I’m fiercely loyal, direct, and relentlessly determined. If you’re someone I love, I do my best to make sure you feel it.

And above all else, I’d rather die alone than shrink down for anyone, ever again.