“Please don’t take it the wrong way. I’m not saying it’s all on you. I did things, too. Or didn’t do them. I didn’t make time for you. I didn’t take you out on dates. I could have taken you out on dates. Had a date night or something. That just seemed like—I don’t know—an old-person thing to do. To have a designated date night. I don’t know. I don’t want you to think I’m blaming you.”
“No, no,” I say. “I don’t.”
Why do I work so hard to appease him? It’s exhausting. I’m so quick to kowtow to his every need. Was it always like this?
“It happens, I guess. You get comfortable, stop putting in that effort. If we could work out that part of it. Be with each other again, like we were at the beginning. I think it’d help us figure out if we should get back together.”
“You want to get back together?” I ask, and I hear it in the pitch of my voice. A flimsy, pathetic hope.
I know if he says yes, it’s a done deal. I’ll pack my shit, quit my job. I’ll go back to the city with him. I’ll stay with him as long as he’ll have me.
A few months ago, I would have been able to do that without any doubts, without any modicum of shame. But now, turns out the idea of abandoning my new life just because he asks me to completely vandalizes the sense of self I’ve been slowly and painstakingly assembling.
“If,” Sam says, and I feel like Wile E. Coyote looking up to see the anvil about to fall on his head. “If we’re able to be with each other again. Get back to how it was.”
“Right,” I say. “Can you be more specific?”
“Let’s just hang out for a while,” he says. “Remember when we’d lie in bed for hours and just hang out?”
“Yeah,” I say, “I remember everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yep.”
“What’d we do on our third date?”
“We got dollar slices, then went to Sly Fox and split a pitcher of beer.”
“They should study you,” he says. “Let’s sit on the couch.”
It’s strange to be near him again. I imagine it’s like returning to your childhood home as an adult. The comfort and nostalgia eclipsed by the distortion of the dimensions. You remember it being bigger than it is. Because you’re bigger than you were.
“This really is a nice place,” he says. “You like it here?”
I shrug. If he’d asked me, say, eight days ago, my answer would have been yes. I would have said the people are nice, a little strange, quirky but endearing. My apartment is great; maybe I wish the bathroom were a little bigger, but it’s otherwise perfect. I’m minutes away from amazing coffee, and when the weather is warm, there’s a farmers market every Saturday. And I have a caring, smart, funny friend. A friend who saw something in me that no one else ever did. Not even you.
But . . . a lot can change in a matter of days.
“How’s work?” he asks.
I tell him about my job, about how the pushy vice principal set me up on a blind double date. I tell him because I want to see how he’ll react. If he’ll get jealous.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
I consider sugarcoating, but instead I say, “Bad.”
I tell him about Pascal, whom I describe as having the personality and general vibe of a ventriloquist’s dummy sans ventriloquist.
“He barely said a word the entire night.”
“Was he a creep?”
“If he had any defining personality traits, maybe, but he didn’t. It was pretty incredible.”
I tell him about Dan, about how he was rude and obnoxious. I say he choked on his food and someone had to come perform the Heimlich. I don’t know how I invent this alternate history so easily. I guess when telling the truth isn’t an option, lies will always be there. They’re opportunists. They’re dandelions.
“It was this awful German-themed restaurant,” I say.
“No,” Sam says, “I don’t believe you.”
“I swear,” I say. “Beer steins everywhere. Everywhere.”
“Yodeling?” he asks.
“No yodeling. Is yodeling German?”
We ask the Internet. We fall down weird rabbit holes. Soon we’re looking up conspiracy theories about the Dyatlov Pass incident.
“Yeti,” he says. “All evidence points to yeti.”
I’d laugh him off, but . . . who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t?