The specifics of the argument were long lost in the space between the shattered tumbler and the sound of her hand striking my face. The slap, not unlike the momentary snap of a tree branch replete with the subsequent descent of everything that branch held, was our conclusion. And then silence, tears drying on her cheeks, a resigned smile stretched between mine. A defense mechanism of a smile, the content façade served to cool my sweltering emotions. My smile calmed my nerves, nerves that were beseeching my hands to retaliate, nerves imploring me to call her a whore, again, nerves begging me to inform her that the shock I felt 8-months prior when I found out she was single, was hollow. Her singular existence wasn’t due to the uneven remainders of love; it was due to the uneven disposition of her psyche. The accounts associated with psychotic lovers are fertile ground for raconteurs to construct enchanting tales of whimsy, passion, and conflict guaranteed to hypnotize the patronage of any bar in any land. But the truth behind the allegory, a truth too uncomfortable to consider, is that before the raconteur could howl tawdry tales in between shots of whiskey he had to hurt, had to feel pain so great that he was forced to carry it with him from bar to bar, from conversation to conversation, and learn to embellish just enough for the lot to find his tragedy palatable and not depressing. Only the poet remembers the roots of his prose; mine bloomed that Tuesday night, when I shattered a tumbler against the wall, and she slapped me.
The night began as most of our nights had recently. I sat on the couch sipping my vodka-tonic and analyzing my keys while she readied herself for a dinner neither of us wanted to attend. We knew that we were headed for a break-up, but the comfort of our mutual tension seemed a better option that the miserable loneliness we were driving toward. The conversation was strained, we checked the time no longer hoping it had stopped, but hoping it had somehow recognized our acrimony and shot far enough ahead for us to have an excuse to back out of our plans. Our stupidity only appears in retrospect, our nihilistic performance had a chance of reverting back to happiness, at least it seemed that way when we held hands on our way to dinner, when we stared at one another from across the table, when we heard voices that sounded exactly like the ones we once loved. She looked the same, she sounded the same, her small soft hand disappeared into mine just like the first time we felt comfortable enough to display our affection – but that was memory. We had become a faded old photograph, a picture of objects only discernible to those who were there when it was taken.
The server’s cheerfulness contrasted sharply with our dour dispositions. I couldn’t laugh at the server’s trite jokes because my date faked amusement and I didn’t want to break the contest of attrition we were embroiled in. After a bad break-up food loses taste, like cardboard grafts embedded between teeth, but during the break-up, food becomes the enemy. All the anger I felt towards her was taken out on my dinner: baked potato became mashed, broccoli rosettes reached puree, and alcohol failed to dull my nerves and just fueled my fire. The moment the orchestra of utensils on plate and ice melting in glass hesitated it was met with the beginning of it. Having been struck by a car (and having survived), I feel qualified to equate what she did to me to the damage the red Firebird had wreaked years ago. The disorientation was the same, the vertigo, the need to check the functionality of my extremities, all the same. I pushed my half-eaten, half-tortured meal to the center of the table informing the server to leave the bill. No I didn’t want desert, no I didn’t need a bag, no, no. She took a sip from her drink to relieve some tension but all it did was enrage me, how could she be thirsty, how could she be callous enough to ignore the man sitting across from her and sip the remnants of a watered-down cocktail. I still remember the first time we went out; with a group of friends we sat and drank around a party-sized table. We both knew what the other was thinking even though neither of us was brazen enough to make a move. She was across the table and one seat to the right and she was chewing gum, and once my rehearsed, mechanical, tepid conversation topics had expired I found myself needing more of her, more words, more time, more glances my way, and instead of decapitating every other person at that table who was filling the ether with voices that were not hers I asked if she had an extra stick of gum. In subsequent weeks she would confess that she felt the same way about our interaction that night and that she feared that when she told me no, I would have lost any reason to talk to her – appropriate that the relationship began with two people afraid to confess their love concludes with two people afraid to end their love. But she said no that night and in an attempt to stave off our conversation’s finale she made sure to tell me that her piece was fresh. In cheesy movies the antagonist would reach across the table and kiss the love interest deep and pull away with overflowing pride and ego and gum. Doubtful that I would ever be able to carry out that task in fantasy let alone reality, so instead I told her to give it to me. I cocked my head back and opened my mouth, and, without skipping a beat, she spat her relatively fresh piece of gum across the table and I caught it, in my mouth. And that is how we began, as a mildly insecure couple that overcompensated for nerves with recklessness. That maddening impulsivity ruled our relationship and kept it alive, kept us alive frankly, in between the drugs, the drinks, the impulsive trips, the constant impaired driving, we had a voltage running between us that we trusted to carry us. But now we were back at her apartment, no current, no impulsivity, a scripted drama was ready to unfold; we were silent on the car ride from the restaurant each preparing a delivery of the grievances that had mounted in recent weeks. We were a lingering decomposition of the psychotic pair spitting gum across a table.
Inside her living room she yelled and screamed and all I heard was what she told me at dinner; she had fucked him and me over. She did it because she thought I had, or was, or was planning to cheat. She had been cheated on before, not by me, but by my predecessors, and she was sick of playing victim. She was alarmed by my unchanging disposition, the fact that I didn’t seem to care about the things boyfriends usually cared about bothered her; I should have been more jealous, we should have fought more, I should have moved past the impractical spirit I had been when the relationship started. The tragedy was that I was rowing against the tide of old boyfriends; I was not pathetically envious of her as they had been and I had not cheated on her like they had. She wanted me to be like them in every facet of the word like; in her mind it had to be one way because it had always been one way with her, insecure men covet her, grow spiteful, and in an act of emotional-preservation they cheated. I’m not claiming to be a better boyfriend than them, but I was different. I gave a damn and losing the finite amount of damns I have through the betrayal of the one I loved was too much for my pensive nature, so I grabbed the tumbler that was full of melted ice water from the vodka tonic I began the night with and I threw it against the wall as hard as I could. It shattered and I ignored the trite symbolism, then with tears in my eyes I called the only girl I had ever loved a whore and she slapped me with that hand that fit perfectly with mine, so I stood there smiling.
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I liked how you guys began.