the importance of your dinner guest

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I didn’t want to write like this, but I need to get it out.  I need to read it back and tell myself I’m self aware, well rounded, one of those girls that drinks green tea every night instead of a six pack of cheap beer.  This is going to be long, but it’s been stuck in me. 

 

The other day I was due to meet the boyfriend at my house so we could have dinner, talk about movies, hold hands and flirt.  I had to stop by the ex’s house to pick up my dog, who she’d been watching.  I check the time before I go inside.  She’s flipping through a magazine on the couch and her house is immaculate.  In the kitchen, there are smells of something wonderful stewing, as she’s due to have some friends over for dinner.  She makes me try her salsa as she prepares herself a martini with expensive vodka and olives with blue cheese in them.  She asks me to stay for dinner, I tell her I can’t.  I look at my art along her walls, stuff I’d given her, sold to her.  She makes me try pieces of steak and it’s lovely and juicy and fresh and melts away in my mouth.  I don’t miss the relationship, but how I miss her food.  She tells me about cooking resort food, her laid back French chef, a movie she just watched narrated by Issabella Rossalini who is “fabulous.”

 

We walk the dogs and she talks to me about making music, visiting Portland, frustrations with the ladies, alcoholism.  When her and I see each other again after an absence, the conversation pours out, easy and expected, creamy, delightful and enlightening. Before I leave she says,

 

“Just stay for dinner.”

 

I decline, again.  She gives me a movie to borrow.  She tells me she’s proud of me for working on the short film, and that she hopes I’m happy.  She walks me to my car, the air is warm and still, Phoenix heat in the dead of that afternoon.  She says,

 

“Just dinner. Please.”

 

I close my eyes tight for a moment.  I want to stay for dinner, but it will be catastrophic for me emotionally, both with my current relationship and my impending state of mind.  I decline again, she nods.  I stare at the time in the car. Fuck  I look at the angry text messages.

 

“Been waiting for a fucking hour.”

 

When I arrive home he’s already gone, mad.  I lay on my rickety Ikea bed and stare up at the ceiling.  The gate in the backyard opens and I go outside to meet him.  His eyes are red and his cheeks are puffy, I can tell even through his well kept beard.  I close the sliding glass door.  I eventually calm him, convince him to sit down outside.  I look at his face.  He is tortured by me.

 

I think about that night before his wedding two years ago.  He left his wife for me.  He left this tall, blonde beautiful girl with a wealthy family and strong devotion to him.  He gave up an easy life in San Diego for time spent in the desert of Phoenix, eating late night Mexican food and arguing about filmmakers.  We had no idea the electricity that was ignited when we came together.  Together, him and I lit f

ire to all of our emotions; anger, sadness, sexuality, happiness.  When we felt free we felt really fucking free.  On the road, that’s when we never fought.  In bed was our sanctuary- a place no one could touch us and where all we touched was each other.  When we first started dating we were on the road a lot.  We drove to nearby cities, we drove up to Northern California for my brother’s wedding.  We stayed in hotel rooms and we’d pull over on the side of a two line highway so we cold make out, touch, squeal, laugh.

 

It was that same array of augmented emotions that made our fights monumental.  It was the electricity we brought out in each other that made us yell, slam doors, threaten, hit, deny, cry, break things.  I’m standing against a wall near the sliding glass door in my dining room.  I’m drunk, I think, and he’s mad because I talked to my ex on the phone, he makes a fist and hits the glass, a framed collage near my head.  It shatters all over the floor like nothing I’d seen before.  I close my eyes, I open them, it’s all still real.

 

After our relationship started I had decided, after he visited me in Phoenix, that I was going to break things off with him.  I knew I wasn’t ready, I believed that I would end up slitting his throat with infidelity and distrust.  I knew myself, and I was falling at that time, into a myriad of unwavering fleeting relationships.  And him.  I didn’t want him to be along for that.  The night after I told him, I came home from work and found a envelope on my bed with typed pages, not a love letter, a piece of literary non-fiction fleshing out his feelings, intentions, confusions.  He titled it, “j’aime vous” and as I read the lines my eyes welled up, and I took back everything I told him the night before

 

He wrote,

 

“…when she came into my life I was not prepared for the events that would follow. I could not possibly foresee the hellfire shit storm that would erupt and rend the flesh from my body. I was completely comfortable, I wallowed in my contentment.  Smothered in convenience and lack of want.  Forgotten were the ideals and desires that had once been set aside.  Then I came out of my bedroom… there were other people in the room but the moment I saw her there, standing scantly over five feet, in shorts and dirty Chucks, I knew something bad was going to happen… I forgot what was happening, I forgot how to pretend.  All I saw was a shiny silver dollar at the deep end.  I wasn’t sure of my swimming skills, but I was sure that I was going to dive in…”

 

It is hard for me to go over things, the millions of events that have happened between us since that day.  That day he talks about, the night before he was to be married to someone else.  When I read over things, when I go over all that he has done just to stay close to me, I feel my stomach turn, not in a pleasant way, in an uncomfortable way; he has always, always loved me. 

 

Now, I am watching him put his hands over his eyes, his face wet and strained.  He is so tired.  He even admits,

 

“I am so tired of chasing you.”

 

Gordon lays on the grass near us, on his back snapping at the grown weeds.  I watch the dog, then look back at him.  He is no less wrecked, he is still chasing me, he is still hoping for that beautiful fucking prize- undelivered.  He wants to be with me, he wants it to work, he stares up at the sky, then back at me, he prays for a resolution.  I am distant, emotionally unavailable, an alcoholic, a flirt, I have ex baggage, a dirty bathroom, I only fuck when I feel like it, I’ve lied, talked shit, been mean, selfish, unappreciative.  I’ve emotionally fed him to a tiger, thrown him off a cliff and still-

 

He sits in my backyard.  He says,

 

“I don’t know why I can’t get away from you.”

 

I show him affection and his response is instant.  All he wants, most days, affection.  Now. I am breaking, hard.  I go back, then return, he doesn’t deserve this, maybe I can change, snap out of it, be happy, stop drinking, stop hating, be in love again. Like it was before.  Or, I continue to exist apathetically, I keep my hands to myself, I’m late, disassociated, I talk to my computer screen but keep my mouth shut at dinner.

 

He looks up, he says,

 

“Do you want to go get dinner?”

 

I shake my head no, I stare at the cigarette butts on the ground outside, I realize our perpetual lack of resolutions, or ability to trade in a massive fight for wings and beer.

 

“Please. Just dinner.”

 

We go somewhere close.  I order two dollar drafts, we talk about movies.