“I want you to tell me what it is I can change so you’ll love me again.” I practiced that line laying in bed, staring at the blank ceiling. How come teenagers and perverts are the only people who decorate their ceilings? My mouth moved but the words didn’t materialize—they were too pathetic. Of course, I was in a pathetic position. Anyone begging for love is pathetic, but anyone doing such a thing knows that there are even worse fates than insurmountable patheticness.
If I had other things going on, this would’ve mattered less. Unfortunately, I didn’t care about my classes, or my job prospects, or going to hell or heaven, or staying alive too long, or being too short or too weird. What I wanted was for her to love me, and we weren’t even dating, which was a new level of pathetic, but who’s there to count at these depths?
She called me pathetic two weeks ago, and I couldn’t refute it. That’s why the word was bouncing around in my head like an exercise ball. It was an off-comment she made in response to me saying I didn’t mind buying her drinks when we went to bars. You’re pathetic, she said, with a smile. We were in my friend’s car at the time, and he brought it up the second after we dropped her off. Laughing deep from his gut, he told me he thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He turned the car around so we could get Wendy’s frosties. I was debating chocolate or vanilla, got chocolate, and regretted it. The frostie mistake brought me to tears, which is when I knew there was a problem.
Then, two days ago, she got mad at me. It was Friday night, I had a drink in my hand, walking outside by the bars, and saw a cop. With a spasm of my arm, I chucked the can into the bushes. She stopped me, told me to pick it up. No, I said. She kept her position on the sidewalk and instructed me again to collect my trash. Then she left me there and went home and my hand was still pretending to hold the can. There was a misunderstanding—she didn’t see the cop and, when I explained the tragedy over FaceTime, she got why I didn’t wanna be charged with street drinking. But, she said, with the simplicity of a macabre kindergarten teacher, she still thought I was a bad person.
An excruciating two days of no communication later, there I was, staring at the eggshell-white paint above where I slept, or mourned, mouthing along to what I could say to convince her to keep me in her life. The stakes were so high that it felt all-encompassing, which provided a sort of relief. The only matter on my mind was the one thing I cared about most in the world. It was excruciating, sure, but being tortured feels like something. A strong, singular something which an emotional masochist can enjoy through a gift from an emotional sadist.
It was obvious that she didn’t love me like I loved her, because she was fine with holding a grudge against me. She was like the moon to me—beautiful, kind of distant. Went through phases but ended up the same. Acne scars visible with a lot of light. Didn’t care about me. But how could you not love the moon?
Yet, not everyone loved the moon. As I lay shiva, my friend came over to my room, blinked at my state, and told me that he didn’t even like spending time with her. He found her self-centered, arrogant, but more than anything, annoying. You need to get over her, he told me, she treats you like shit. You’re obviously right, I replied, but who cares? We laid on my bed together while he told me his drifting thoughts, how he didn’t wanna see his rat coworker with the ugly pug face tomorrow, how the girl he took out twice texted him again and he was so over it he wanted to puke, and other such musings.
Had I eaten yet, he asked. We got to Chipotle right before it closed and ate bowls in his car. His bowl was overwhelmed by sour cream, which disgusted me. Not that I had room to talk about presentation—my complexion was reminiscent of a freshly-exorcized person. In his red Chevy, we got deep between mouthfuls of assorted Mexican-inspired ingredients.
“I’m concerned about you,” he said, “For real.”
“Thanks.”
“Remember when you yelled at that jackass last year? He made a shitty comment and you yelled at him. Honest to god screamed at this random ass dude. Best shit I’ve ever seen.”
“That was a good time,” I recalled.
“Why can’t you do that with her?”
“Because I love her and I’ve never loved anyone before, so, if I lose this, I’ll never find it again.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Sure, when you think about it, it’s dumb. But my gut says that I need her and it’ll kill me if I lose her. I can’t fathom losing her, man.”
“I think you’re just dumb, then.”
“We’ve known that,” I said, laughing, which allowed a spark of enjoyment to break through my somber demeanor for the first time since the fateful incident.
He drove us through some of the backroads, going too fast around hilly curves. My phone buzzed in my pocket, causing my heart to pound fervently. A deer’s eyes glowed green in the headlights, staring blankly at us idiots. I didn’t check my phone, hoping for the best and preparing myself for the mundane.
When he dropped me off, it was around 11 and we both had classes in the morning. Or else we’d be shitfaced already. In a chirpy goodbye, I demonstrated that I was in an improved state and he had done a good deed as a friend. He could go home proud, while I locked myself in my bedroom and clicked open my phone to see a text from her.
I’m sick of fighting. Lets be over this
Thank god. Relief flooded over me in a wave—a rogue wave, which comes out of nowhere and swallows a boat whole in the Bermuda Triangle. Totally eclipsing everything else. Beauty exemplified by magnitude, or some other horror like that. My hands shook as I texted her back; the words forming themselves in my draft message couldn’t reflect the immensity nor composition of the mixture of gratefulness and disgust looming in my gut.
So I responded, with self-loathing and immense pseudo-physical relief:
Okay, love you
And, immediately, my phone returned the favor.
Love you
My heart fell back into my chest, and all was right again.