She was in my kitchen when I got home, opening my mail.
“How’d you get in,” I asked her, angrily surprised but too polite to be anything but civil.
“I borrowed a set of keys the last time I was here,” she said, holding them up, letting them glint smugly in the late afternoon sun.
“You stole them,” I said, to which she shrugged.
“You need to give those back,” I told her. It sounded weak coming out of my mouth. I was never good at asking for things I really wanted, never any fucking good. I went around her and poured myself a glass of water. I didn’t really want it but I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I was sick of her hanging around, always on top of me, crowding me. Not only did I not appreciate her as a person, but more importantly, I had no interest in fucking her and she knew as much, but I couldn’t tell if her constant clinging despite that fact was out of being naïve or brilliantly manipulative. It’s not you, I had told her once, it’s all girls. They’ve got nothing I’m interested in. So it’s me AND all girls, she said. Get a penis and will talk, I joked dismissively, and for a split second, I worried if she was the type who was crazy enough to actually go out and do something like that, just for the sake of dishing out crow.
“You’ve gotta pay your bills,” she said nonchalantly, holding up a pink letter, acting as if her letting herself into my home was the most normal thing in the world.
“Fuuuck,” I exhaled quietly, when I really wanted to say “Get the fuck out of my house.” I grabbed the bill out of her hands, then scooped the rest of the pile before she could get any kind of defensive position over them.
“Listen, I need a place for a while. I’ve gotta find a place to stay. You’ve gotta let me stay. “
I said no in my head. I mean, obviously, no way in fucking hell. But my stomach sank. I’m the world’s biggest pussy and I knew it.
“It’s just for a few days. You won’t even notice me. “
Why is it that she’s making it sound more like a statement than a request?
(let’s face it…there’s nothing on this earth that I can stand up to)
The drowning gets louder and louder in my head as something overwhelming fills my chest and lungs, and the next thing I know, I’m putting my cup in the sink and I’m dropping my mail into the trash…and I’m walking back out the door, quietly pulling it closed behind me.
5:12 am is a good hour to wake up drunk.
******************************************
Her stray, wounded puppy act was getting to me, especially because there were times I looked at her and suspected her of being deceptively dangerous. But every time I asked her when she was going to leave, she told me I was passive aggressive. It didn’t even make any sense. “What is it about me that turns you off so much,” she would ask.
You just have to open your mouth and I curdle inside, I would tell her, with a tone like I was joking when I really wasn’t. Like I didn’t have the guts to just say it and mean it. And then despite her tough girl act, I could see her insides flinch, and I’d feel a rough twinge of guilt. She didn’t get it. Or was this part of her thing to get into my head? I honestly wasn’t sure.
Last week this woman with a deep smoker’s voice called for her at 2:41am on my home line. I’d been asking her not to give out my number to people, especially crazy female strangers picked up from bars whose insane jealousies didn’t adhere to normal waking hours. I could hear her in the living room, alternating between sniffling and screaming (fucking lesbian phone sex, I thought), as I cussed at her in my head and tried to plunge back into sleep. But when I got up in the morning, I saw her asleep on the couch with an expression so intent on hiding out in the underworld of sleep that it made me feel sorry enough for her to want to do something nice for her.
I stopped by the newsstand on my way home and picked up a few of those magazines she likes, those fancy architecture ones that are thick like glossy books. I can’t stand them; even the pictures bore me. But I think she liked to keep them around because they made her feel cultured. Maybe sophisticated. I got home to see she was in the exact same spot on the couch, even though she was now wearing my favorite t-shirt sans pants and my fucking UNDERWEAR. She was eating peanut butter out of the jar with a serving spoon, dipping and dipping again. I hated her. What was I thinking, doing something nice for her. It only encouraged her ridiculous sense of entitlement. I threw the magazines down on the coffee table like I wanted them to be an insult. “I found these at the office,” I said. “You want ‘em?” The intonation was equivalent to me saying “fuck you.”
She slipped that spoon into her mouth and licked it nowhere near clean then stuck it back into the jar. I wanted to kill her.
“Have you ever been in love?”, she asked me.
“No,” I said, quickly with finality, not even sure myself if it was a lie. My only concern was that I ended any kind of assumed intimacy she thought she had with me.
“Do you think the world is as complicated as you? Or do you just look at it that way so you have an excuse to stay locked up in your head?”
She swirled that spoon around in the jar.
I glared at her. I didn’t have time for her semantics and her incessant digging at my seams, her condescending analysis of me when what she really wanted was a way to claw inside me until she found a part of me that would need her. I didn’t have time for her shit, not when I find myself spending more and more time each day having to remind myself of my will to exist, when I find myself driving around with a mini-recorder to record my last words just in case…just in case something happens to me so there will be meaningful last words that were designated last words, not something worthless like asking for a super-size at the drive-through window that will serve for eternity as the bullshit echo of my legacy. Yeah, this world is fucking complicated.
“You’re so passive aggressive, you know that?” She said it so blasély as she took another lick off that spoon.
I smiled at her through clenched teeth, my blood pulsing at the end of each and every one of my fingers. I promised myself that if she said another fucking word, I was going to throw her and that damn jar of peanut butter head-first off the fucking balcony.