We go to war with each other. With moods. A callous ‘I can’t tonight’. The absence of a forced laugh. A lack of attention. Differences of opinion. Subtleties that incite. I don’t think we mean to do it. Certainly there are moments plotted. But in the end, I think it just sort of happens, subconsciously. Maybe it’s not so much a game as it is the failure of a ridiculous expectation that two people will share the same disposition at any given time.
“Mmm,” she moans, scooping rice into her mouth, most of it waterfalling over her chopsticks. “Brandi and some of the girls are going out to West Sixth tomorrow night…we should go.”
She’s twenty-nine, but doesn’t seem a day over eighteen. None of them ever do. She’s wearing a slim black dress with slits cut at mid-thigh. She’s worn it at work before. Her hair always seems nicer when she doesn’t do anything to it, but tonight she has it frizzled and curled. Same goes for her lips, which she’s lacquered with blood red paint.
“I don’t think so,” I say, my eyes fixed on swirling a roll around a pool of thick brown goop. “Not really my scene.”
“C’mon, it’ll be fun. We both work all the time…it would be nice to go out to a real bar for once.”
“I hate that whole area…it wouldn’t be fun for me. You should go, though.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean that I hate that whole area, and I wouldn’t have fun.”
“But I would?”
“You just said you would,” I mumble, my cheek puffed with a mashed mixture of salmon, cream cheese and rice.
I have to come to learn that in my twenty-six years, I know next to nothing when it comes to sexual relationships. But I do know that the ensuing few seconds of silence has officially killed this one. It may take awhile longer for the structural damage that just occurred to send the whole thing into collapse. But this is the beginning of the end.
“Well, I’d rather hang out with you.”
These are the sorts of comments that I brush off, or don’t even think about, until hours, months, or years down the road, when I finally see one vulnerable human being reaching out to another, a chain reaction from some misguided form of affection. It is then that I set out to amend such callousness, but by then it is already to late – they have either moved on, or are now on the attack, leaving me to counter. It seems to be cyclical, the nature of those I gravitate towards. We both seem to be active participants in giving and receiving the antithesis to our dispositions. But again, I don’t think we realize that at the time.
“That’s fine.”
“And we’ll go to West Sixth?” she asks, lowering her eyes to meet mine.
“No,” I say after a bout of silence. “If you want to go there, go. If you want to hang out with me, that’s cool, too. But I hate that place, I never have fun there, and the only reason I’d be there would be to hang out with you…and we wouldn’t be able to talk because they’d be blaring some shitty…I don’t know, who’s popular these days?”
“Katy Perry.”
“Some shitty Katy Perry song.” She laughs. My humor is a right hook meant to back the opponent off.
She puts her hand on mine, and softens her eyes, in the manner that a mother or a sister or a close friend would. This freaks the hell out of me. I don’t really know how to go back to the apartment and fuck someone who does that. For worse, I need that cold distance we just braved back there. I need the beginning of the end in order to go on. I need that war.
And when I don’t, when I want to raise the white flag and call an end to the whole thing, just shut my mouth and drink enough $6 rums to be comfortable simulating sex in public to to Lil’ Wayne, and admit to deep affection…she will be ready to fight.
