behave

I went through the car wash over the weekend.  During the week, when I’m running errands at lunch, I walked past my car three times, end up circling the parking lot.  It doesn’t look like it’s mine when it’s shiny.

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There’s a blizzard in the middle of March. My car crusts over. It’s easy to find in a parking lot.

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I don’t go out on Friday night, and then wake up at 8 on Saturday morning and am at the pool by 8:30.

“I would feel smug,” Casey says at 1:15 when we finally meet up for brunch. (“Brunch.”) “All day long, I’d be like, ha, I went swimming before nine.”

“I guess,” I said. “Mostly I’m just like what am I going to do for the rest of the day?”

I get bored and it’s the end of the world. I’m empty and my life is empty. It’s always been empty. It’s always going to be empty. I’m alone. All the days are the same. I start looking at volunteer postings. Maybe I should mentor a teenager.

I join a new gym. I start eating breakfast every day and always bringing lunches to work. I make dinner each night. It’s tiring and eventually I’m bored of that as well but I’ve managed every day for the past three weeks. It just takes one or two bad things to make me loathe myself but I need a whole lot of good behaviour if I’m going to justify myself to… myself.   I wake up in the morning and think I can’t get up; I was sad last night, but it was every night and there's never a reason to be sad.

At work, my boss is away for a week. I run a meeting with various consultants to start up a project. They’re all 15-30 years older than me, but they have to listen to me because my company pays them. I feel feintly accomplished, relieved to finally have something to talk about with my parents.  When I tell them,  they just ask when I`m going to start applying for a new job. They want me to move back to the west coast. They want me in another industry.

After brunch, one of my university friends, Elle, texts me that she’s having an early St. Patrick’s Day party. I won’t know anyone there, but I also don’t have any other plans, so I go.  She’s close enough to walk, but it’s bitterly cold and I take the subway. On autopilot, I get on the eastbound train, only realizing a few stops down that I’m meant to be going west.

When I finally get there, it’s me, Elle and her husband, and seven other couples.  One of the couples is twisted together on a loveseat and they don’t untangle at all through the night.

I end up in the kitchen with Elle and most of the other women. They’re skinny and beautiful, like actors the Toronto recast of The OC.  I’m drunk enough that I can still act sober: two rum and cokes at home while I get ready, an entire bottle of wine and an Irish bomb (Guinness and a shot of Baileys: delicious). I smoke up when I get home at the end of the night and write most of this blog post.

I’m really good with normal people. That’s how Karen puts it. She says it’s because I have straight hair and wear mascara. I do wear a lot of mascara, but sometimes I curl my hair with an iron.  I think it’s just that I’m good at making small talk.

They start talking about how this girl’s boyfriend hasn’t realized he’s gay yet.

“The guy with grey hair?” I ask.

Yeah.

It’s funny because everyone thought Elle’s now-husband was gay when we were in university. She’s taller than him.  One time the two of them came over to my place when we were heading to meet other people at a club and he talked about how his red scarf cost over $200. I think his parents are rich. I think her parents are rich. I think they’re happy together.

I get off the subway and walk all the way down the platform in the wrong direction because I’m used to taking the other train.  At home, I step into the elevator and press the button. I do a double take because it seems  I’ve pressed nine. Why the fuck did I press nine?  I live on the sixth floor.  I follow the line of numbers up. Four and then five and then nine….it was just that someone turned the six upside down. I pressed the right button. I get off on the right floor.  My dinner dishes are still on the table. I need to change the cat’s litter. There’s dirty laundry at the foot of my bed. I’m lazy and slobby and lonely. It’s going to be Monday soon. The weeks move faster than the days.

you're not coming by

Park Guy stopped texted. He was busy at work and we hadn’t been seeing each other a ton but we got together, it was fun, and then he stopped texting. Eventually I touched base to make sure he was still alive. He was, and he was busy at work, and he didn’t apologize for the radio silence or say anything about getting together later, so, okay, that’s done. It was easy, because he was a stranger and none of my friends had met him and I still wasn’t sure that I liked him most days, but it was out of nowhere and when people asked about him, I’d have to say, “No, it’s done, he’s gone.”

“Oh no, what happened?”

“I don’t know, he stopped texting.”

Everyone said I was meant to sent him an angry text or voicemail to chew him out for how badly he handled it, but I was embarrassed and that seemed like that would make it worse. I was too embarrassed to even admit how embarrassed I was for the first week. Shame’s funny because it feels impossible to talk about, but admitting it is the only thing that makes it go away. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Was I really never going to hear from him again? Maybe he’d met someone new. (Better.) He’d said nice things about me; those must have been lies. Four months is short in the objective passing of time but it’s long to end without a single word. I felt lonely. I used to always feel lonely, but it’s not as often anymore. I felt lonely again.

Karen and I met for brunch the Sunday before last. She’d lived in the neighbourhood of the restaurant when we were going to school and then moved to Montreal for work before moving back again. She talked about the old house constantly. I remember her being unhappy in the house, not necessarily because of the house, though it did have rats and the cat food got maggots if she left it out too long, but because the house didn’t cure any other stresses. It was beautiful, though. I felt like a kid sitting under the magnolia tree and then I felt like a grown up.

She had to rent in a hurry and ended up with a basement suite that doesn’t have an stove, just a hot plate. It only has as many windows as basement apartments ever have. She bought a blue light lamp and said it’s helping a little. She was fired from her job a couple of weeks ago and is looking for new work. Her plans are always: find a new job, get the old house back.

“Or another one,” I said. “There are other beautiful houses. You just need to get out of your current place.”

“I want that house,” she said. “It has to be that house.”

I said, “See, that’s the thing with this breakup, or whatever. It’s not that I miss that house. It’s just that I don’t want to go back to living in the basement.”

We got day drunk on $14 cocktails.

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On Saturday, Karen went downtown to pick up supplies for the terrariums. I was going to go to the optometrist and meet her down there, but early afternoon I realized that I’d already invited two university friends over for dinner and completely got the week wrong, so Karen was going to have to come straight to my house instead.

I went to the optometrist and told the doctor that I’d seen a weird sparkly blind spot on Wednesday. She said she was going to dilate my eyes to check it out.

“Can I still drive home?”

“Is it close? Yes, that should be fine. You just won’t be able to see things up close and you’ll be more sensitive to light. And everything will be blurry.”

But totally fine to drive.

I waited in the main part of the store for my eyes to dilate and got to actively experience the worsening of vision. I couldn’t see anything near, especially when I was wearing my glasses. When I had to pay for the appointment, I took off my glasses and pressed my face to the Visa machine.

The optometrist said I had excellent ocular health and sent me on my way. It was a bit like being stoned, because everything looked weird and I was focused so hard on acting normal. I went to the butcher for meat, Shoppers for coke and chips. Drove myself home. It’s funny how little vision you need to drive a familiar route.

Karen came over first, then R and E - all three I’d met in university - as well as Casey, who I’ve been friends with for 15 years. I made chicken, quinoa, roast sweet potatoes and garlic, a salad with spinach, tomatoes, roast squash, feta and pumpkin seeds. Casey’s a vegetarian so I hard boiled eggs for her. I don’t think it seemed like I’d forgotten I invited everyone over, but the meal was almost entirely scrounged from my cupboards. E brought a homemade vegan apple tart, Karen bought a pie, and Casey pastries from the coffee shop she works at. There was a lot of food.

My pupils were still dilated when everyone got there. I tried to pour a drink and missed the glass.

“How much have you had already?” Karen laughed.

“No, it’s my eyes, I can’t see.”

She looked at me and said, “It looks like you’re massively high on E. Just like normal before a dinner party - take some E, turn on the oven.”

After we ate, I said that it was over with Park Guy.

R said that it sucked, but it didn’t seem like I was that into him anyway.

I never know how to explain that it doesn’t matter how little I like someone, everyone is still meant to like me. I already knew that I was going to have to end it eventually (he didn’t like my cat; he was obsessive about cleanliness and only ate take out - I am a slob who loves to cook; he demonstrated absolutely no awareness that females are capable of having orgasms) but that didn’t make it any easier that he ended it sooner. I was meant to use him to practice communicating about things that bother me.

Karen slept over. He left a pair of his underwear at my house and Karen wanted to see them because I’d told her that he always left his underwear on during sex and she thought that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. I showed her because I felt mean.

I’d already washed them and it felt weird to me to touch them, but Karen picked them up immediately. “Neutral Fruit of the Loom,” she said after a thoughtful inspection. “Means he never got out of the cage.”

In the morning we heated the leftover pastries from last night and she helped me wash the dishes. It seems so appealing to have a house full of leftovers, but I never manage it properly because with just one person, it all goes bad too quickly. I had different friends over last weekend and they left carrot cake. I managed two pieces, forgot about it, and now it’s a week-old soggy mess that I have to clean out of my fridge. Except that this weekend Karen was there, so we finished all the pastries that morning before they went stale. We ate the rest of the hard boiled eggs. I wasn’t one person alone.

We pulled out all the supplies: plastic animals, rocks, liquid to make ponds, dried Irish moss, two families of tiny people that won’t stand unless you glue them to something. Fake plastic trees. Five live air plants.

Halfway through we realized that we don’t have enough plants or rocks or vases, and drove to IKEA. Park Guy lives a couple kilometers directly south of me and as we drove past it, I pointed out his townhouse to Karen.

“Is it weird that he’s so close?” she asked.

“Just that I’m worried I’ll bump into him. I was at the butcher and he said he goes there sometimes.” I pulled onto the highway. “I bet he doesn’t go that often though; he never cooked. And I probably wouldn’t see him even if he was there. I’m so blind.”

That’s the cliche. Never saw it coming.