Inside a Roman Mind

Sei

Sei

'Hey,' she said with a delicate smile as he stepped through the door, closing it gently, but not cautiously, behind himself. 'Hey,' he responded flatly. Moving himself towards the couch that sat in front of a giant television playing a rerun of a game of American Football, he dropped his bag carefully and slouched himself into the seating. He was feeling off but he wasn't entirely sure why. She was standing in the kitchen washing dishes and cooking food. It smelled amazing.
There was a giant, unignorably jarring lapse of time before either began speaking again. 'How are things?' She asked. Obviously she was trying to be genuine in her tone but it was coming off as uncharacteristically guarded. The message she was sending him with every tonal deviation she made in her voice was that of uncertainty. He, too, felt uncertain and so he imagined any words that he spoke would come out in the same guarded tone. It took him a while to think of exactly what to say, exactly how to say it and, by the time he worked that out, the time had almost passed where it would be less damaging to just say nothing at all. Feign ignorance or something. 'Eh,' he opened. 'I've been better.' Switching channels, he paused to let the cracking sound of cosmic background radiation interrupt his response. What a fitting metaphor he thought, having remnants of the birth of the universe compartmentalize his words. 'But alright I guess.'
Who would have even guessed that this had been the first time two lovers had seen each other since he had returned from Italy? It was like she hadn't even noticed at all, her greeting was something one would expect coming back from the local shops, not from an extended overseas visit.
'How are you?'
She put down a plate to respond over her shoulder. Neither of them had even looked at each other yet. They may as well have been speaking to themselves with the other not present at all.
'Yeah I'm good thanks.'
That was a flat response, especially by her standards. She'd always been an expressive person. Hiding emotions didn't come naturally to her. It didn't seem like she wore her heart on her sleeve or anything but she most definitely did dress herself in her emotions rather than her opinions. After a while it seemed that the line had been blurred—the two were more or less the same.
He finally stopped clicking on the remote when he stumbled across a strange mock game show. How intriguing. It was this sort of game where contestants had to run across ridiculous obstacle courses which balanced precariously over bodies of water. Literally one wrong placed foot would lead to a failed run, often frustratingly so if any contestant managed to make it anywhere near the end of the course. Over the top of the action were two American commentators trying to crack jokes and accommodate for the otherwise cheap laughs the show was intended to generate. The word intriguing, as he had reflected earlier, was used because he vividly remembered a show, airing several years ago, that this show was obviously ripping off. The only problem was the older show was Japanese, the obstacle courses balanced difficulty with comedy, and the American voiceovers, acting as fake dubs for the actual Japanese commentators, were actually funny. Everything about this show seemed cheap, but it was mind numbingly cheap.
'I give up.'
He snaps out of his TV Zen to see her, detached from the kitchen and standing at the doorway looking towards him. How long had it been since she had said anything?
He slid his body around to face her—not fully, though, instead offsetting himself so that he had a reason to not actually look her in the face. Calmly, he responded, 'what do you mean?'
'This, this whole fucking thing with you and me at the moment.' Her voice hadn't raised into a scream or a shout but there was extreme frustration in her tone, every word she said she seemed to chew up before spitting out. 'You said you were sorry,' she took a step forward, closer towards him, 'that means trying to not do it again.'
She paused long enough for him to think about speaking. As he opened his mouth, but before he could vocalize any sentiment, she proceeded. 'How can I take your apology when you keep doing the same fucking thing?'
The words stung. He wasn't in the mood for this, he was feeling far too defeated, tired, worn down at the moment. What was there for him to do? Recognize defeat and lie down, submit?
'You're not the first.' Finally he found it within himself to speak. 'Give up, it's fine.'
With growing frustration, she looked at him quizzically. He couldn't even look back at her. Instead he looked at the front door. It wasn't much of an invitation at the moment but it seemed like this could be it. 'What are you on about?'
'Don't pretend like this isn't what you want. You hide it well but you loathe me, and I don't blame you. I mean, I loathe me but I'm not the victim here. Just... just fucking hate me, just hate me and be open about it, it'll feel better.'
'I don't want it!' She blurted out the moment he finished. 'I actually want to be with you. You know how hard it is to be with someone that won't talk to you? Or the one person you want to talk to the most has shut you out completely? I don't have a clue what is happening in your life anymore, I have to find it on some stupid fucking rebound from your friends and your Facebook shit.' Shifting her tone slightly, she goes for his next sentiment. 'And yes,' she said matter-of-factly. 'I did hate you. I hated that you were the one that made me feel so depressed and that it was my fault that we were drifting apart. I hated you for making me lose so much sleep because all I could do was wonder what was happening, whether I was going to get you back, whether I even fucking wanted you back. I hated you for being the reason I've cried at work and at home and whenever you're not around, with my friends and family for the last four months. And I hated that you just didn't care about any of this. You were...' she laughed, looking up slightly and, for once, actually legitimately smiling. 'You were my best friend in a way,' she followed this by dropping her tone back down, from nostalgic reminiscence to bitter sweet agony. 'You were so much closer than just a boyfriend but you turned away from me when I was always there for you. But I always wanted to work things out and I hoped that one day we would be okay. So yeah, I did hate you but now I just,' she adjusted herself, trying to find the right words. 'Now I just don't feel anything. You were the one person that I thought would always be open to me but I suppose that was wrong, I suppose what we had was all fake.'
This is it: the stunning conclusion to her most energetic monolog to date. 'What do you want from me?' He finally inserted, like some sort of cannon fodder, words that at surface level seemed like they made sense but, upon further inspection, revealed themselves as completely redundant and fanciful to the actual situation.
'I can't be the only one fighting for us anymore. I want to be with you but only if you want it. It's a two way thing and that's on you.'
A fair assertion.
'So what now?' He had yet to raise his voice to any level above a normal, calm, collected tone. This must have been frustrating to her because she was throwing everything out there and he couldn't even bother to change his mood. 'I think I've gotten everything out.'
'You haven't said anything though!'
'What's there to say?'
Abruptly, he halts her attack. She double takes and needs a moment to regain herself.
'Fine,' stoically she begins. 'All I can say is it's in your corner. I've told you,' she contorts her face, like the words are some sort of poison she's eliminating from her system, 'I wanted to make this work, but you can't expect me to change who I am. I've been the same person you met four and a half years ago so blaming me for not being someone you want me to be isn't a real reason. If you want to stay with me you have to actually make it work, you've got to work out what you want from me. You can't suddenly just treat me like shit and think an apology will make it up if you're not then going to act on the apology. You can't just run away to Europe because you need time to think and then come back and do the exact same thing the minute you walk through the door.'
With lucidity firmly gripping his mind, he felt it due time to actually speak. The time of his voice being passive, non-persuasive, but bitter was through. 'You know what I want,' he began, cryptically. 'I want to cut the shit and just fucking admit that you've always had doubts about the relationship in the first place and the only reason we're like this now is because we've moved past the comfort of makeup sex, and know this on every level, I want to be something with you but the die is case, all I'm doing now is being pleasant, I'm not trying. I'm not actively trying to push you out anymore and that's something you should be happy about but I'm just letting what there is left in this thing roll on without having to push it. This should be easy, a relationship shouldn't be an uphill battle. I never said I wanted you to change, you put those words in my mouth, all I did four months ago was identify a problem and, as soon as I identified it I told you about it but I made it clear that I didn't even want you to do anything, I just wanted the issue to be acknowledged, to be out in the air and not hidden from one of us.'
As he had powered through this improvised monolog, he had noticed levels of disgust, disagreement and surprise wash over her face at different things he had said. It was incredibly surprising that not once had she tried to speak over the top of him during it, to try and get a thought in before he had finished.
This time calmly, lacking the emotional charge she had relied on before, she responded. 'I never had doubts about us, not once. And yeah, I did acknowledge "it." You know what I'm like with friends and with you and you know, if I'm doing something that one of my friends doesn't like I'll actively try and make them feel better. Can you see the problem? What you said, way back when, was that me being me wasn't enough, and I tried to be like your other friends but you're right that's just not me, I can never be like one of the guys and I think you know deep down that's why we became a thing in the first place.'
'I didn't say it wasn't good enough. I said it was the cause of like, half of my esteem problems that I have had for the last three years.'
This much he believed to be true, but he had never truly been able to explain the logic behind the conclusion in simple terms. He felt it relied too heavily on introspection for it to be summated easily; too many pieces of small evidence circling around a particular theme, rather than a few pieces of conclusive evidence. He could write a full short story about exactly why he came to this conclusion. He could see the proofs all around him; his at times awkward interactions with his friends, his inability to form meaningful friendships, his jealousies of others and his blatant inability to accept himself for himself. There was always something frustrating to improve on, always something so fundamental to his being that was just wrong. It was her that caused this because it was she that didn't communicate with him. At first he had thought it would pass but when it didn't it became increasingly concerning and, until only a few months ago, he had believed that it was his fault that she and he couldn't hold a conversation, it was his fault that they had no substantive points of connection other than the physical relationship that they both enjoyed. The evidence of this seemed to be all around him and it manifest in these relationships with others, the contrived attempts at friendships that he would attempt that, through his biased eye, probably appeared to any other person as a weak, half attempt at being civil but being completely unsure of exactly how that is enacted. He had blamed himself entirely for these problems in the exact same way he had blamed himself entirely for the faults he could see within the relationship with her. So when he found out that she just didn't really bother speaking much, that his attempts to speak with her were real and apparent and she was simply the one that failed to reciprocate, he had finally the last piece of the puzzle and the veil was drawn, revealing to him the world for what it truly was: one without her.
'Just think back to when you told me that, you said that me being me just wasn't good enough, can you do that?'
What a way to put words in his mouth. 'Remember, how you said that I have empty conversations and what you called a... a one track mind?'
He did recall that. It was over text message two months before he had gone to Italy. He'd been at work when it hit him like a sack of bricks, because he was right in the middle of an incredibly pleasant, engaging, and thought provoking conversation with a near stranger that had lasted well over an hour in length. If anything that he had held to be true in his self-deprecating world view actually had been true that conversation would never have made it that far. All the examples he had used to form his theory that he was the problem were cherry picked from a sea of conveniently ignored examples that contradicted it. And so, stripping the theory of all its defensive walls of cumulated examples, he saw it as fallacious and then, just like that, he stumbled out of the conversation when in his mind the tables dramatically turned.
'How would you take it if you read what you sent me back then?'
'I would have died.'
She looked at him in approval, and some light, briefly, returned to her eyes. 'It would have been a slap in the face, like a cold shower or something, because I would have seen the truth in it immediately. But that's just me.'
The light left as quickly as it had arrived and she was right back to where she started. Nothing was getting through to him, they were back in adversarial mode. 'The death part is close to how I felt. But there was no truth, it was just so random and out of the blue.'
He snapped back immediately. 'So you think it's just totally fine that I can absolutely dominate a conversation because you can't be bothered to direct it?'
'You always knew that it isn't because I can't be bothered. I can be, but how much do you want to change before I'm someone else for you? It's not even like I do this to just you, I'm the same for everyone else. I even try more with you, I try to make the conversation but I can't talk about the same things you do with your buddies. I don't have the same taste, but when I talk to you about other things you blamed me for being one dimensional. And that's why I let you lead, because I only have so many things that I can talk about, and you get bored of them.'
He breathed out, trying to fake his way into actually relaxing. 'This was always the impasse. I don't want you to change, all I did way back when was I recognized a problem existed. I was the one that changed to accommodate.'
'Alright,' she led, but immediately paused to consider carefully her words. 'Look I get that I do, but that isn't the problem, the problem is that before you can let things be you need to cement a relationship. That takes effort from both. So what do you want?'
Leaning back into the couch, he looked at the TV to avert himself from her. 'I just want to be one of the girls I guess. We don't really have anything to talk about in the first place so why whip the horse's eyes?'
Visibly frustrated, she raised her voice. Instead of blurting out uncontrollably, she very calmly, in a staccato fashion, addressed her concern. 'You don't get it, I want to talk to you.' She stopped to let her volume lower. 'But you've gotten so closed off I don't feel like I can anymore. We haven't really talked since that day, every time I...'
He cut her off as abruptly as he possibly could. 'If you want to talk then fine, but for the last few months I've just been being you. All I'm doing is giving you roughly the same level of response that you give me.' He paused but didn't let her proceed with a response. It was an aggressive pause. Emphasizing every word that slid off his tongue, almost sarcastically he proceeded. 'Don't think there isn't a level of intimacy that I share with you. When I talk to you I do so genuinely. I guess you could say I'm just naturally pretty passive in conversation now, that's just how I am, and how much do you want me to change before I'm a completely different person?'
She laughed pessimistically at his mockery. 'I always knew I cared about you more than you cared about me, but I was somehow okay with that. So all I want is to know why, because nothing you've said so far has made any sense as a whole. Not to me, anyway.'
'Of course it wouldn't.' Would he later regret these words?
'So help me to understand.'
He paused. 'Alright. First off, it's become clear that speaking to you over the last few years, from probably only a little while after you and I met, has made me... well I guess it's just damaged my own self esteem a lot and for no good reason. So then two, if this is the case, as it is, then short of actually asking you to change, it should stand to reason that I should at least attempt to minimize the damage that you were unknowingly causing?'
'If I made you feel so bad then why did you keep talking to me? Why not just cut me off at the beginning?' She sighed. 'I'm sorry I was damaging you. All I ever wanted was for you to be happy.'
'I don't know, I guess I cared too much. There was too much to lose for me. I assumed the same from you. And I didn't notice until I started to care.'
He stood, now looking her in the eye. There was a real sense of intimacy that was circling them as he looked down at her and she up at him, but it felt pyrrhic, if that's the right word to use. Too little too late wasn't quite adequate enough a phrase. Maybe melancholic. A melancholic intimacy.
'I cared about you more than you would ever know. When you said you had doubts about the future of being with me, it broke me. And I know this sounds dramatic but go and ask anyone who saw me back then. I was broken. I never stopped you from anything. I told you time and time again you were an amazing person and a fantastic boyfriend and anyone would be lucky to know you. If that's damaging then...' she breathed out in defeat. 'I'm sorry.'
Very seriously now he had to consider whether it was worth continuing. There were definitely two paths that he could take, because she had just completely exposed herself to him. It didn't feel like enough, somehow. The apology was heartfelt but it just wasn't enough for him.
'That's all just surface level stuff,' he said stoically. 'Compared to the countless times I haven't been able to carry a conversation with you and thought it was completely my fault. And remember, that's the sort of person that I am. If I see a problem I look to myself first to try and find the cause. And I thought for a long time that I was just horrible with people, and nah it just turned out that you don't really talk. You led me to believe for three years that I was some kind of socially retarded half human, some kind of robot made to impersonate a real human and act like one, but without the fundamental essence of connectivity that really makes someone human.'
'I'm sorry...'
'You've apologized, I've already forgiven you, there wasn't anything you could do. You were just being yourself.'
'And you don't like me for me anymore...' It was like he was ripping her in half. There was a real terrified anxiety that echoed from her hollow voice. 'So what is it you want? Cause you don't want me to change, but I'm damaging you.'
She continued to glance at the couch, like she wanted to sit down or at least move from such a confronting position, but she lacked the fortitude to be able to. She was caught in some kind of purgatory where her legs could no longer support the weight of her world but her determination couldn't make her move to ease her pain. Awkwardly she stood. 'We can keep going being friends or something? Where eventually we fall back to fighting about something, or... we don't be friends. You know I care about you and that I always held you as one of my closest people. But I don't know what to do anymore. I haven't for a long time.'
'Me neither. I told you I'm just happy being one of the girls.' Very softly, gently he proceeded to destroy her world. 'And we can chat when we're free, but I'm low expectation.'
To her credit she didn't cry as she uttered her last few words to him. She asked him what he meant by that and he made it clear, he doesn't expect much from her, and he's okay with that and she should be too. She sat down on the couch finally, but couldn't find a comfortable place to rest so sat upright, elbows on her knees, resting her chin in her hands. 'Right. Well I guess this is it then.'
He had his bag. It was time. He'd gotten what he wanted. 'It was fun while it lasted.' He turned his back and approached the door but found it in him to enjoy one last bitter sweet memento. He laughed and sat himself down on the ground leaning against the door. 'I must admit I'm a little hurt. I remember telling you once that I wanted to one day be like eighty, and still be with you...'
She laughed, choking back the onset of tears she was so desperately trying to keep at bay. 'Yeah. It made me really happy that you wanted that. Cause I really wanted that too.' She smiled. 'Remember I made you promise me that you would be?'
'I wanted to be. That's why I told you.'
'I still want that. But you aren't happy, you need to be happy first.'
'I'm never going to be happy. It's a pipedream.'
He stood himself up and grabbed his backpack once again, slinging it around his shoulder.
'You will,' she conceded. 'Maybe now that I'm out of your life you can find what you really want.'
'Yeah...' he opened the door. 'Anyway... I'll, uh...' He turned around to face outside, away from her. 'I'll see you around.'
There was just something about the way that she spoke to him, her voice, maybe what she said or some type of nonspecific thing that just really got under his nerves, far more than usual. They'd been fighting for four months and every day felt like a struggle. He wouldn't be the first to admit, knowing everything he knows, that he most definitely felt as though it had come to this simply because a heartfelt apology seemed at this point too little too late—even if that was all she wanted.

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