Years Later
by GEORGIA HARDSTARK
I had made up my mind almost a year ago. Although, if I'm going to be honest with myself, I've been suspecting this decision was lurking in the background for at least two years of our five year relationship.
The sad part about the whole thing though, the part that makes me hate myself a little and wonder what the hell is wrong with me, is that I could have stayed in this relationship for the rest of my life and been perfectly fine. He was content with comfort and complacency. Not to say that I didn't make him happy, but even if I hadn't, he would have stuck around. He was just that kind of guy..."loyal" is what some people might call it. What is wrong with me, though, that "perfectly fine" isn't good enough for my life? Where did that ego come from, the one that's sure I somehow deserve more, deserve some euphorically happy existence that I'm not completely certain I've even earned?
His mother had died just two months prior to us meeting, he told me this in the loud bar I after I had approached him based solely on his appearance. We leaned casually against the wall, him sipping a vodka/red bull and myself taking a pull off my beer often, as my mouth was dry from nervousness. I liked him immediately. We talked for three hours, until the bar closed, about movies and life and politics. Looking back, I want to say that we were both psychically aware of how important our meeting was to each other's lives, how important the other would become, but there's no way of really knowing that.
He didn't tell me that he had a daughter until our second date. By that time I already knew I would love him, don't ask me how. He seemed almost like a puppy that had been abandoned, and I wanted nothing more than to take care of him. We were drinking 40's of cheap malt liquor in paper bags (a spirit that's only ironic to younger people of a certain demographic, like ourselves) in a parking garage outside of a college. The point was to get somewhat inebriated before attending the concert in the recreation hall of this upper-class college, and we ended up talking long after the first band had started. He didn't even tell me about his daughter, I had to ask him. He was telling me some pointless story about a guy he ha met during a drug-fueled road trip who had missing teeth and photos of his son thumb-tacked to the wall of his house.
"Wait," I interrupted, "do you have a kid?"
"Uhhh, yeah. A daughter. She's 10." That made me only 11 years older than she was. She was conceived when I was still weaning myself off thumb-sucking -- my rapidly protruding front teeth the catalyst that finally pushed me to stop. He was only 19 at the time.
People asked me if I freaked out when he told me, or if I had thought about not dating him because of it, and I always answer the same way; "No, it made sense for some reason." And it did make sense. It was almost like something snapped into place in my head and I realized that having a boyfriend who had a child made perfect sense for me.
"Oh." was how I responded, staring out the car widow for a few moments while my brain fit the puzzle together. When it all fell snugly into place, I shrugged - as if bouncing any problem that I could have found in the situation off my shoulders and into the ether. "Okay," I concluded definitively before taking another swig off my 40 oz., which was laughably large for my small frame.
...
My cat and I moved in to his little house in the San Fernando Valley six months later. The house had belonged to his step mother before she went crazy and died. The small, WWI-era bungalow was still peppered with her furniture, and the walls had ghostly outlines from framed photos that she had hung on the walls before her brain had started to deceive her. The house always had a creepy feel to it, and I hated being there alone.
The backyard didn't help matters much, as it had two outhouse-sized structures that had served as his stepmother's playrooms when she was a child, and now held massive amounts of junk furniture and huge, lurking spiders. Their once girly and cheerful now faded facade did nothing to detract from the nightmarish quality of the twin playhouses. I did my best not to look out the window into the backyard at night, which was difficult because there was a window facing the backyard directly above the kitchen sink. I'd look up from a load of dishes (he never did the dishes, he hated dishes) to see my own ghostly face looking back at me. I always expected some sort of ghoulish creature to pop up from behind my reflection, but it never happened. Eventually I just stopped doing dishes altogether.
We spent two lovely years in that house. I think of it now like a time capsule of our happiness. We passed most of the time by fucking, which was really a strong suit during our entire relationship. We'd eat and then fuck. Get high and then fuck. Watch TV. and then fuck. You get the picture. We'd take a break from all the fucking once every month or so when his daughter would visit from San Francisco. She loved me...I loved her. I was made for this stepmother thing, I told myself. Kids had always liked me; I didn't talk down to them and had a sense of humor they could relate to. I wasn't like any adult she had met, because really, I was still so much a kid myself. It was an odd, quirky, confusing little relationship we had, the three of us, and I treasured it.
"My dad will never get married," she told me from the backseat of my car while I was driving her around town. Her dad was at work so we were spending the day together. He had never married her mother, and I answered "oh really?", but what I really meant was "I'll prove you wrong." Turns out I was the one who was wrong. I still wonder if she wasn't warning me, and I realize that, at ten years old, she understood her father a lot better than I did.
...
His dad died of cancer sometime after the New Year. He had owned a printing shop in the Valley throughout the 80's and the toxic chemicals he had inhaled day after day, year after year, had infiltrated his body and caused him to shit blood, and towards the end, babble incoherently - his brain malfunctioning from the cancer that engulfed almost every inch of his body. It was hard to watch, but I watched, bedside, because I loved his son and therefore loved him too. We drank whiskey in a dimly lit dive bar an hour after he finally died. It was surreal.
We moved to San Francisco that fall. I was 23 years old and ready to get away from my family, ready to be a grown up. I didn't want to keep him from his daughter, and thought she deserved to have her father close by, just as my father had been when I was growing up. I don't know if he would have ever moved there if it hadn't been for my insistence. I don't think he likes it there anymore, now that I'm gone.
THREE YEARS LATER
With a quick twist of the rusted faucet, the whoosh of the water becomes silent, and the bathtub stills. You lean back, resting your head against an expertly placed towel, and close your eyes for a moment. The drip, drip, drip of the faucet helps to relax you. You’ve always liked melodic noises and movement. Watching a window washer squeegee a window, each swipe precisely wiping away a line of water, then the next, then the next. The drip of the faucet has the same affect on you.
It’s your first night in your tiny one bedroom flat. After the two migrant workers left, having carted your belongings from the motel to your third floor walk up, you immediately striped out of your clothes, which were filthy from the newspaper that covered all your fragile belonging.
You try to relax and push out the thought that’s trying to burrow into your mind: “I wonder what filthy person was bathing in this exact tub not two weeks ago...and did I clean it well enough to rid it of any trace of them?” If anyone ever asked you if you were neurotic, you’d lie and say “no”.
The last month has been a blur, and you’re completely surprised by your lack of emotions regarding the whole damn thing. Despite the fact that you’ve changed your life so much in the past thirty days - that’s its completely indistinguishable from the one you were living a mere month ago - yet you haven’t cried once, is shocking to you. It makes you think of the time he asked you, when you were first dating, whether or not you cried a lot. You had told him “no”, and you can’t remember if you had believed it yourself. Later, he would tease you after you had cheered up following one of your regular crying jags by mockingly saying “No, I don’t cry very often”. You would playfully slap him and say “Yeah, sorry 'bout that one...what I meant was 'yes, I do cry a lot'.” He would be surprised and probably sad to hear that you hadn’t yet cried.
Although you had been thinking about the possible break-up, which seemed inevitable yet still somewhat avoidable, for over a year, you still couldn’t believe it when you had actually done it. It was on the day of your five year anniversary, which you think has something to do with that neuroticism of yours, and not wanting to say something like “four and a half years” or “three years and eight months” when anyone asked how long you had been together.
It was on the drive home from Lake Tahoe, where you had spent your anniversary. It was a boring two nights (barely talking and definitely not fucking) and you had been picking fights with him throughout the entire drive home. You pulled into the parking lot of a 7-11 because you were crying so badly you couldn’t see the road. You had never yelled at each other before...never. Yes, there had been arguments, but there was never anger there. When he exasperatingly asked you “Do you want to break up with me??!” you had fired back “Yes!” before you even knew what was coming out of your mouth. It was silent after that. The only sound made during the drive back was him quietly crying. You felt like the worst person in the world, but you didn’t take it back.
Although part of the break up had to do with you wanting to return to Los Angeles, due to outside issues you had to stay in San Francisco for a month following the break-up. You didn’t hate each other, you were both just really sad, and so you didn’t move out of the house for your remaining month in San Francisco. After a lot of crying, you convinced him that both of you could pretend like nothing had changed for the next month, and that you’d act like boyfriend and girlfriend. He never really believed it, neither of you did, but you acted your parts because the alternative was too painful.
He helped you pack your belongings into the rented minivan on the day you moved, which shows how much he cared about you. He helped you pack up the life that you had shared together, even though it was one he didn’t want to end. He still helped. After everything was packed, you put your arms around each other and lay down on the bed for the last time. You were eager to leave, but it was because you didn’t have what it takes to deal with it. You cleared your mind though, and grasped the situation, because you knew there wouldn’t be one like it with him ever again.
When you said goodbye for the last time, and he watched you drive away, all you had wanted to do was fast forward. You knew that in a year, you would be healed. That you would be sure you had made the right decision and that your life wouldn’t be lived in a waiting room anymore. But instead you experienced every minute of that six hour drive. Even if you had cd’s to listen to that didn’t remind you of him and cause you to start bawling, you wouldn’t have been able to listen to them, as Elvis - your cross-eyed Siamese cat - cried loudly throughout the entire drive, and even more-so when the radio was on. So you drove in silence and talked to Elvis, and gave yourself half-assed pep talks when you felt your eyes going blurry from tears. You practiced saying “I live in Los Angeles”, but it sounded insincere.
...
The ringing of your cell phone, perched on the towel you’ve placed on the toilet beside the tub, jolts you back to reality. It’s Alie, and before she even gets the destination of where she’s inviting you to out of her mouth, you’re already accepting. You have tons of unpacking to do, Elvis is freaked out at the new place and needs your company, you have a million resumes to send out...but you don’t want to be alone, so you accept. That’s pretty much what you’re life has been like since you got back to Los Angeles. You had a brief fling with a guy that, under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t have given the time of day to, but he was a nice distraction, nonetheless.
You submerge yourself under the water one last time. Your eyes are closed and the only thing you hear is the sound that the chain attached to the drain-stopper makes as it taps against the porcelain tub. Ping. Ping. Ping. You count them, and wish they each were a month passing you by.
Ping.
May is gone, and your social anxiety (an anxiety that can only be honed after multiple years as one half of a reclusive couple) starts to fade.
Ping.
June has passed, along with your birthday and the sadness of having no one to wake up next to that morning, wishing you a happy one.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
July, August, September...you’ve made close friends again, and never spend Saturday night alone at home, wondering why the hell you left behind a constant companion for this uncertainty.
Ping.
In October, you take your first trip back to San Francisco, so that he won’t be alone on his birthday. He gets drunk and yells at you...embarrasses you in front of your friends. You remember that he used to do that a lot. From your bed on the couch that night, in the apartment you once shared, you survey what used to be your home. You feel suffocated and out of place. You take the Greyhound home a day early, and spend Halloween with your friends.
Ping.
November passes quickly so that you don’t have to wallow in the misery of finding out he’s dating someone else. All the flings that you’ve had in the past six months sort themselves out, and whatever emotional attachments you thought you’d made, fade comfortably into the background.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
At each passing month, you think about where you were that time the previous year, and marvel at how much you’ve grown as a person and how much courage it took to wade through that emotional muck, never really knowing what would be on the other side. Even though you had doubted it, things really did get better within a year.
That’s all still to come, though. You pull the stopper from the drain and watch transfixed as every last drop of bathwater swirls down with an unpleasant slurp.
Georgia Hardstark is the contributing editor to This Recording. She blogs here, and tumbls here. The paintings are by Amy Bennett.
"Mystery" - BLK JKS (mp3)
"Lakeside" - BLK JKS (mp3)
"Summertime" - BLK JKS (mp3)
FILM 
