Chapter 1
I haven’t been in a defined relationship in years.
Who I am, and how I view the world, has shut off that avenue rather effectively. My mating season has clearly passed.
My last long-term last relationship, and I define relationship as making a commitment to one person, living with that person, and sharing your life, your bed and your everyday existence with that person, ended in 2007.
I have had subsequent attempts at romantic involvement but those were difficult, short term affairs that ended abruptly and, for the most part, should never have happened in the first place. They were unfair false starts and my heart wasn’t really in it, I’m sorry to say. They just seemed like good ideas at the moment. One of those more recent relationships actually seemed to have a chance but, again, it eventually wandered away from me.
So, officially, early 2007 was the final time I had any hope in that arena.
She was almost 20 years younger than I was but our aesthetics seemed to match well and we initially had great fun together. She made me laugh and that’s not easy to do consistently. We actually fell in love, or what I thought I knew love to be, and things seemed perfect.
But she proved a difficult woman. Cold. Unfeeling. She seemed so unconcerned that if I had caught fire she would have barely noticed, unless I was blocking the TV at the time.
What happened, what I’ve identified as “the pattern” now, is that she slowly came to realize that I wasn’t a project. I wasn’t going to change. I did not possess “potential”. That meant that, as she evolved into the many people she would become during the course of our relationship, I remained unchanged and that bothered her more and more as time went on. It was never clear to me what she wanted me to be because she had a great deal of difficulty with the concept of relationship communication but once she learned that things were not going to turn into her vision of rainbows and puppies she started losing interest. She also hated that I smoked pot and that’s not changing, god dammit.
Our relationship eventually devolved into a situation where we would both get up and go to work and then, when we came home, she would talk to me for hours about her stupid coworkers and recount every moment of her day while we ate a dinner I had prepared. That was it. No sex. No affection. Just a nightly repeated monologue that repeated like an audio loop designed to slowly drive me mad. Whatever tenuous threads that had initially bound us together became fraying bonds of boredom and ennui.
Then she began to react as though I was tasering her when I touched her, cowering as though I had beaten her whenever I tried to be intimate which, in retrospect, should have been my course of action. My most vivid recollection of this came one evening when we were curled up on the couch watching some inane program of her choosing. She had leaned against me and I had slid my arm down the front of her top, resting on her warm chest. At one point I moved and brushed one of her nipples with my hand unintentionally. She let out this loud wounded yelp that actually scared me and, when I asked what was wrong, she said “I hate to be touched there”.
That was news to me.
One particular evening of her meticulous work day reporting was especially memorable for me. She was explaining to me that someone at her office had asked her something she didn’t know how to answer so she pulled a maneuver I had witnessed many time before. She froze. She stared at the person and didn’t say a word until that person moved on to a more articulate coworker. Then she said these words to me: “I think I’m retarded”. I said “You’re not retarded”. She said “But I think I am. I’m retarded. I don’t want to be but I think I am”.
At that point I took a page from her book (of mostly pictures) and stopped responding until she moved on to another workplace story.
Eventually it became apparent that the relationship wasn’t working anymore and we had both fallen into a pattern of dead, boring acceptance. We were no longer accomplishing anything. We simply existed in each others periphery under the same roof. It was just a matter of time before one of us called it off although it seemed that neither of us had the courage or the interest to make that move. We were defeated people.
Then, one day, she called me at work and asked if we could have lunch. Six years together and she had never called me for lunch. I agreed and met her at Crossroads Mall in Bellevue with a healthy sense of what was to come. We sat at a table in the food court without ordering any food. She said “I’m unhappy and I’m moving out”. I asked “When”? She said “Today”.
And that was it. There had been absolutely no discussion prior to this because my every attempt to talk to her about our direction was met with the same stony silence I was always met with. No negotiation. No consideration. Never “we need to work on this”.
“I’m unhappy and I’m moving out”.
When I got home from work her stuff was mostly gone except for the furniture she had claimed with sticky notes and instructions that she would pick up those items later. I contacted the landlord to explain why we would be vacating the property and I started packing up my stuff, preparing to find somewhere cheaper to live. I began the process of shutting it all down. I won’t lie. It was hard.
Imagine standing on the tracks and watching a train inching towards you over an excruciatingly long period of time. Even though the train is moving at a glacial pace it’s still going to hurt when it runs you over.
Through the course of the relationship I had watched her make countless immediate and irreversible decisions on other people in her circle, people she had decided to stop associating with for whatever reason and, without warning or fanfare, she had always done exactly that. I had always prepared myself that when our situation was over she was going to treat me exactly the same and that is exactly what she did. I’m leaving. Poof. Gone. Into the Witness Relocation Program without another word.
Frankly the only surprising aspect of the whole sequence of events was that she was the one who took the initiative. It was not normal for her to make a decisive move (what are YOU hungry for?) and having her cut off the relationship so quickly and efficiently was a little jarring but not unexpected.
Cut to years later, without having heard another word from her in all that time, I was walking through the same Crossroads Mall when, to my complete surprise, I saw her walking towards me. I had no idea how this was going to play out. Would we ignore each other? Would we stop and chat? I had no read on the situation. My brain rattled off a variety of possible scenarios. What I could never have anticipated was her coming right up to me, hugging me, and saying “It’s SO good to SEE you. How have you BEEN?” in the most fake and uncharacteristic manner possible. It’s almost like it wasn’t actually her. That she had somehow been replaced by a look-alike female robot who was programmed to participate in the false niceties and fake Emily Post manners that seem to rule the world here. It was entirely un-genuine.
So I went the only place I could go. It was almost as if my brain was firing off a statement before I could think about it and, in retrospect, it was the greatest thing I could have ever said.
I said “You remember that time you told me you thought you were retarded”?
She said “Yes”?
I said “You were right” and I walked away.
I hope I ruined her fucking life.
