He called me last night when I was on the bus, coming back from a not-so-happy happy hour. I’d left class early (she was just reading out of the book) and he rambled on for over a half an hour about who knows what: his impending flight for work, what he was going to eat the next day. It was all chatty Cathy; at one point, he asked if I could talk. I said I was on the bus, and he said: “Not that kind of talk.”
It’s so easy to be flighty, detached from feeling–to talk about the situation with your landlord instead of having broken your (former?) lover’s heart. The one mention of it came when he was recounting, natch, a gastronomical tale; he was eating lunch with a friend at a sub shop and he told her what I’d said:
“Do you think this is going to work out?” He said his friend laughed at that.
“What, is he a girl?” she said, because I’d followed that up with “Why?”
Girly? Perhaps. But it was I; I wasn’t trying to make a Hollywood moment there. But he laughed at it, with his friend, and even with me on the phone; like all our moments, all the times when he’d hurt me, say, or when I exposed myself to him, he mocked it.
I go back and forth. I think about lying next to him and never want to leave; I think about him hitting me and never want to see him again. I want to fix him; I want him to fix himself. Mostly I just want someone who is beautiful and loves me all the time. I don’t know if he is that guy.
