Dear Pretend Girlfriend:

This day may seem unfair to you. Why can’t it be the day that I cheated on you, you might wonder. How can I be so sure that it will be you who strays, if one of us were to stray at all?

It’s a feeling I get, Pretend Girlfriend. I certainly have never cheated, and as far as I know I’ve never been cheated on, but something about you brings out the best and the worst in me, and this is one of those things that I’m sure will do one or the other. And so, eventually, you must do it.

How will I react, when you finally tell me in tears what you did? (It will be you who breaks down and tells me; I am not clever enough to figure these things out on my own, and I am not possessive enough to snoop through your text messages, and I am not the sort of person who walks into rooms where dramatic things are going on.)

I guess I’ll want to know who it was first. Is it one of our friends? Is it some stranger to me, a coworker or someone you know from church? Is it a stranger to you? Were you drinking? Does it matter?

When you tell me who it was, the importance of the other party’s identity fades in my mind. Now I must know what you did. Did you sleep with her? In what way? In which of the myriad ways?

Was it something that technically may not be considered sex? Did you keep all your clothes on or something? Will it only make me more angry to hear you say that?

Now the details of what you’ve done start to stutter in importance. I’ve gotten past the fact-collecting mission of this conversation; I don’t want to know any more. I want to smash things. We don’t have anything that’s both breakable and expensive. That’s frustrating.

When I was a kid, Pretend Girlfriend, I took my frustration out on my parents’ old wine glasses. You remember me telling you this; I would collect all their mismatched stemware, a goblet without a mate, a cordial glass with a chip in it, a pair of flutes that no one ever used, and I would carry them behind the house. Each one had to be carefully weighed in my hand; the lighter the glass, the more impact I figured it needed to make the paper-thin crystal shatter with the same kind of bang that the thicker glass did. I lived for that bang and that perfect moment of powdered shards held in a bubble against the stucco wall, their final Wile E. Coyote moment before they fell onto the brown grass below.

You tearfully go to the kitchen cabinet and collect all the cheap Ikea stemware that we bought together to entertain at the apartment. You lay all the glasses on their sides on a serving tray and bring them to me, still sitting on the couch, vibrating with anger.

Where the fuck am I going to throw these? I ask. We don’t have a backyard, and I’m not breaking glass on the stoop. You’re such a fucking idiot sometimes, I say, and I’m not talking about the glass.

You finally say you’re sorry. You’re sorry it ever happened. If you could go back in time, this would be the one thing you tried to fix. You wouldn’t even try to kill Hitler.

I don’t take the joke well. I take the tray from you. I go into our bathroom and lock the door. I pull back the plastic patterned shower curtain and pick up one of the four red wine glasses. I don’t even drink red wine because it gives me a headache. This entire set is just for you and the guests. Maybe one of the guests you slept with.

I have never even considered being with someone else after we started dating. We joke that it’s almost like monogamy has given me blinders; I don’t seem to notice attractive people on the subway anymore; you have to draw my attention to the fact that someone is flirting with me, when someone is flirting with me.

The red wine glass is nicely thick. I stand as far back as I can against the door and throw it as hard as I can. It smashes against the far tile, a tiny sliver flying wild and nicking me on the cheek, but I don’t notice. I pick up the second glass.

A beautiful woman asked for my phone number just the other month at a cocktail party. I had demurred in what I’d hoped was a charming way, and then came home to tell you all about it. You’re such a cunt, and I am such a loser. The second glass explodes better than the first.

I heft the third in my hand and hear you knocking on the other side of the door, right behind my head. Are you okay, you ask. Am I okay? Bang. I tell you to ask me after one more glass.

This is the last glass that I’ve allotted myself. No way am I destroying the white wine glasses or the flutes, so I want this last one to really count. The pieces of the first three glasses are scattered around the bathroom. Most of the shards have landed safely in the tub, but here and there: a thick base rolled under the toilet, a jagged triangle that made its way into the sink, a half-moon lip that’s nestled against my bare foot.

I notice then that, thus far, you have not told me you still love me and want to make things right. You’re silent on the other side of the door. I’m silent. The last glass falls from my numb hand and cracks in a disappointingly quiet way on the floor.

Tonight, I’ll leave all the broken glass in the bathroom. I’ll grab a bag and go sleep on someone’s couch instead of speaking to you. The next day I will go to California, which is where I go when I don’t want to speak to someone on the east coast. If I could afford it, it would be Tokyo. Jakarta. Tibet. But North Hollywood will serve. I will sleep on an old friend’s floor and drink his microbrews and go over every detail of failure between us. I will take your phone calls in a sullen way, and we will talk in circles.

In a week I’ll come back to the apartment, and we’ll be back together. Because you’ll have said all the right things, all the things I wanted to hear you say before I broke our glasses. You’ll have used your argument of honesty and promises to sway me. And most of all, you will have preyed on my selfish fears: getting old, dying alone, having nothing to do on a Thursday night.

We will tell each other as we get older that this experience made us stronger, that it was one of those tests that all relationships must go through, and boy did we pass. We’ll pat ourselves on the back and buy lots of white wine. But after this, you’re forever afraid to serve red wine in our house, and I’m forever certain in the back of my mind that you’re fucking other people. We are worse for this, but can’t admit it, and so we don’t.