Because Everyone Else Is Doing It

liesaboutmyfriends:

Six months into a new relationship, my first love and twice-girlfriend drunk-dialed me. “I love you,” she said. “Come live with me.”

 I considered my list of things to hold against her, including the two other times she had torn me away from previous engagements, only to leave me after two months. There was a scar under my left eye from when she hurled half of her clarinet at me after whiskey started an argument. If you disregarded the screaming matches with my parents and the weed she hid in my shoes, the complaints were more general: she farted in her sleep. She wrote in my books or borrowed them into a black hole. She nicknamed me Naïve. She couldn’t cook without a microwave. She very seldomly washed her clothes. She owed me somewhere in the range of seven hundred to a thousand dollars.

She met me at the bus stop to Brooklyn, and when we kissed she threw her arms around the back of my neck and hung there, her legs scrambling to hook around my hips. She told me she loved me, and even though on the bus ride home I caught her examining no less than three men, I believed her.

—

She wouldn’t stop talking about the backyard. “The best part of the apartment,” she said. I expected a gas grill, white lawn chairs that dug cross-hatches into the back of your thighs, black dirt corralled by chicken-wire, pushing up produce. Instead there was cement and beer bottles, a black garbage bag shivering in the wind.

“It’s lovely,” I told her, and when she stood in the middle on the blanket of dead leaves and trash and held out her arms like wings, it was almost true.

She threw the butts of her hand-rolled cigarettes into her neighbor’s backyard. They accumulated in the cracks of the cement, half-finished maggots without a place to burrow. Her room was two inches deep with clothes and candy wrappers. She wouldn’t let me walk through it in shoes. When we fucked on her bed, it was like fucking on a beach of crumbs.

—

We tried planting things in the backyard. We spent all day in the sun, forgetting sunscreen, so that when we went inside for water and sex rubbing against each other hurt. She traced the borders of my farmer’s tan with Sharpie marker, so it looked like I wore a ringer tee shirtless.

“You get off on humiliating me,” I said.

“Hold still,” she said, scribbling a handlebar moustache under my nose.

—

The night before I left I was casually probing her when I feel something torn that wasn’t torn before. She shifted when my finger grazed the tear. “Be gentle,” she said. 

I lunged four fingers inside of her. She tried to wriggle away, but I anchored her to my hand, curling my fingers up inside of her.

“Who was it?” I said.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

“Good.”

This is excellent.