Victor and vanquished

I caught a glimpse of a tv show on Saturday night. I think it was The Bachelorette, but I can’t be sure because I turned away before it was able to burn a hole in my brain. In the brief bit I saw, two contestants were in a boxing ring with gloves and head gear on, and I remembered…

Part of why I write is because I have selective amnesia. When things go wrong, I withdraw into myself and I sleep. While sleeping, I actively work on forgetting. There are these little pixies, and they forage around in my head and remove entire swathes of painful memories. When I wake up, I don’t remember anymore why I was so sad. I also don’t remember a lot of other things because sometimes the pixies get over-zealous and remove too much, but that’s alright. There is bliss in ignorance.
Once in a while, something happens that shakes loose an old memory. It comes to me muddy and incomplete and I have to brush it off and polish it first to get the full picture, then see where it fits. In doing this, I uncover a larger plot that might not be entirely accurate, but is really all I have. The pieces of my past, like a jigsaw puzzle in a pile at my feet with pieces missing from the original puzzle and extra pieces from other puzzles.

In my first year at university, I was friends with a guy and a girl who were dating. The guy was tall, brown hair, not muscled, but big, and very interested in being popular. He wrote for the school newspaper, was in the school student senate, would always stop professors outside to talk to them. That sort of thing. All this in the first year.
The girl was cute. Not stunning, not hot, just cute and quirky. We all met at the same time before they started dating, so it wasn’t like he had first dibs. They started dating, and that was okay. We, all three, were still friends.
But then they broke up, and that wasn’t okay. Not with him. Because we two were still friends. I would talk to her, we would hang out. And I would talk to him too, in that awkward post-relationship-’I am friends with your ex’ way.

One day, I was with her, having lunch outside the student center, and we talked about relationships, and why she went out with him. And she said, “I like those type of guys.”
“What type?” I was curious now that it had come up.
“Well, there are two types of guys. Guys who are athletic, like him, and guys like you.”

I think that was the most painful thing I have ever been told. It was like someone had slapped my nerd glasses off my face, leaving me groping around on the floor on my hands and knees crying that I couldn’t see without my glasses.
But I swallowed it, yes, because we all two were still friends.

Which made it all the more confusing when he walked up to me studying in the library one day and said he wanted to talk. I was sitting at a table with three other people, so I got up and we took it to a quiet corner between shelves of books. He had become convinced, in a high school way, that I had stolen his girlfriend. He told me this in very harsh language, hissing through his teeth and poking me in the chest with his massive finger. As I tried to sort through his accusation, the pokes escalated to soft punches. And from there, we scuffled quietly between the bookshelves, careful not to draw attention to ourselves.

When we were done, I walked back to the table, my shirt askew and my collar half-popped from a headlock. I sat down and tried to read unsuccessfully for a while, before getting up and telling my study partners I had to go.

Later when I told the story to a classmate, in an attempt to give it relevance and make it sound romantic, she asked, “Were you fighting for her love?”
And I thought, what a stupid question.

Waits for no man

******************

Day 90

I’m pacing. Back and forth, and back and forth.
Finally, I give in and pick up my phone.

As the phone rings, I prepare myself, clear my throat and try to sound airy.

She comes on after the fourth ring, curt.
“Hello”

“Hey, how are you?” I manage a light tone.

“Fine. What is it?”

“Nothing, I just wanted to hear your voice, to make sure you’re okay.”

She says nothing, so I try again.

“I’m serious. I’m just checking on you. Don’t worry, I won’t bring up the relationship or anything. I want us to remain friends.”

She is quiet for a while, then she replies,
“We are friends. I have to get back to work. I’ll call you later.”

I say “Bye” just as the click ends the calls and I wonder if she heard me.

I look down at the phone, Call ended 00:01:00.
Exactly one minute.

******************

Day 180

I’m calling again.

“Hello”

“Oh,” She sounds disappointed it is me, “how are you?”

“I’m fine, been busy with work and everything else”

“Good… good…. good…” Her voice trails off into silence.

I brace myself and continue,
“I hear you’re getting married.”

She is silent for a long time.

I would think the phone has been disconnected if I couldn’t hear her TV in the background. It’s a talent show with musical performances.

The announcer introduces a new performer. A young voice comes on, singing about love.

I cough and try a small: “Hello?”

She barks back at me,
“Who told you that?”

I exhale, long and drawn out.

“Never mind, I just wanted to know if it was true or not…. I figured you would have mentioned it.”

“Where are you getting these things from?”

“That’s not important. I’m going to go.”

“What? We haven’t talked in a while. I assumed you didn’t want to be friends anymore.”

“And you concluded we weren’t? That’s fine.” I say, before hanging up.

She doesn’t call back.

******************

The next time I see her, she is walking down out of the church, arm in arm with her new husband.
I wave. She waves back, her eyes wide with surprise.

I smile and nod, before noticing she isn’t looking at me. She is looking past me at the excited woman jumping behind me.
The couple glides past.

I melt into the crowd, look for the exit and head towards it.

Ve haf vays of making you talk

I got a phone call from a female friend who had met a guy I knew and wanted information on him.
This is fairly common, that whole pre-date interview, “I met him, he says he knows you, I was wondering what do you think of him?”
And that question always starts up a whole allegiance test. Like if your sister asks you about some far-off guy that you used to work with, the things you would tell her about him are vastly different from what you would tell him about her.
If your sister got arrested one time, he might not need to know, or hear it from you. But if he got arrested, you’d damn well better tell your sister she’s considering dating an ex-con. “I heard he ate some people and threatened the witnesses. That’s how he got off scot-free.”

You have to juggle your friends to find out who carries more weight and who gets the full truth.

The problem with this particular pre-date interview was that both friends rated equally with me.
In a tie, for most people, same gender wins. Bros before … err… foes.
This situation was further complicated by the fact that they are both annoyingly complicated people that I wouldn’t consider hooking anyone up with, much less with each other. I can’t even imagine how they met.
I couldn’t tell her about him without pointing out that the same lengthy list of complaints on him were problems I think she also has.

Either I just give her a thumbs up “he’s great”. Or I end up insulting her, which is probably not what she wants to hear.

I want to do neither, to bow out and give her no information. But she’s presistent, she’s squeezing me saying “Is that all? Is that all?” after every single sentence.

So I end the conversation with a simple “Run like hell”.

Then I hang up on her and call him to give him the same advice.

Nobody is hooking up on my watch.

TT: look, ma! a head in a jar

When you get to a certain age, specific conversations start to repeat themselves with alarming frequency.
Hanging out with people, the talk often leads to questions about love and relationships.
And the questions are usually centred around one thing, “what is your type?”

My response is always the same. Always a safe answer that cannot be used against me later.
I say, I don’t have a type, because it is safe and because it is mostly true.

Then they ask a follow-up question like, “Does she have to speak English?”

But they are not asking “does she have to speak good English?” which is a question about how particular you are about grammar.

Instead they are legitimately asking what if the two of you cannot understand each other because you have different languages.

What type of life do they think I have where I’ll be sitting at a bar and a woman who doesn’t speak English will slide into the stool next to me and say, “Je t’adore.”

These people have been watching too many romantic films.

Or maybe they are thinking of it in a village sense, where I’ll be walking on a dusty path between mud huts and I will see her through the palm fronds that line the community well.

I will watch as she pulls the bucket up from the well, hand over hand, the length of rope piling up at her feet.

She will fill her basin, bend over and pick up it up, lifting it and balancing on her head.
Some of the water will spill, splashing on her shoulders, trickling down the front of her wrapper.

She will walk on the path towards me, glancing at me through smoky eyelashes.
I will lick my lips and untangle my tongue enough to mumble “yaya aiki” as she passes.

So I reply
Okay. She doesn’t have to speak English. Happy?

The questioners will now ramp it up with something like,
“Does she have to have hands?”

Hands?

Are you serious? Hands?

I’ll ask for clarification
She won’t have hands at all? Or can she have like …. lobster pincers?

And they will say, very seriously, “No hands at all.”

Well, if she doesn’t have hands or speak English, how will she do the sign language for ‘I wuv you’ in the final romantic scene of the shitty movie playing in your head?

Alright, no hands.
Hands are optional for me.

Just give me a person with a torso that makes guttural noises and I’ll be fine.
Ridiculous.