August 25, 2008
Spilled Coffee #1
She had just moved into his house, and it was weird. Not weird because he had been Mr. Happily Single or HBO primetime I’m-afraid-of-commitment fodder or anything like that, but because they weren’t partners at all. They even had an awful sex life, where awful means once every two weeks and it was work, god was it ever work. It often resulted in crying. And they were going to be married in about a month at a fancy country club and it was going to cost upwards of $20K and the only thing he wanted out of the deal was a huge house in the right zip code to show everyone he had actually arrived, because that was what he had been taught was important. Of course, she wanted babies and to quit working, because that equaled an identity.
That was the deal. Unspoken and subtly hostile, but a deal nonetheless. Their future had an agenda, like a meeting or a conference. Or a trial.
So you’d think on the cold October night just after she moved in, when they were about to sleep in the soon-to-be marital bed, and she told him that if they didn’t fix their sex life then there would be problems down the road, one of them would get the hint. The ideas of big houses or kids or money or whatever would, just for a moment, take a backseat to the realities of not being connected at all in the way married people need to be, but no, it didn’t.
And that was one of the many red flags that were ignored. That was how dedicated they were to marching headlong into the icy wind, candles extinguished, propelled by the demons of their upbringings.
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4 Responses to “Spilled Coffee #1”
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Wow.
I’m not sure it’s right to say I’m looking forward to this, but you know what I mean.
Very nice.
Oh my. Truth is beautiful and terrible, at the same time.