"This is like a nightmare."
She sighed as she rested her head against the window-pane. I really couldn't tell what was going on in her head. People aren't supposed to behave like this. If she was a robot, she would be sent back to the factory. Sir, Unit 00535673324 is malfunctioning again. Really? Must be another burned out diode. Haul her in. But wasn't that her greatest asset to me? If so, what did this imply about me? A big "wrong way, go back" sign in my brain. Don't go there.
Everyone needs to blame something. It's one of those lessons in life you pick up along the way, but you forget where you learned it. And in the end, I am a really, really good target for that blame. Like that fat kid in school with glasses, or the computer nerd with the nervous twitch from too many late night Tetris sessions. I think it's because I really make people angry with my awful tongue, full of spite, malice, bitterness, irony. Sarcasm, I guess, is the modern equivalent of all those put together. Why do we do it to ourselves?
It is this blame which tore her and I apart. There's little things we can't stand about each other. Terminal jealousy - mutual terminal jealousy, actually. Each other's sarcasm. Each other's friends. Each other's friends of the opposite sex. Our manipulating way of getting what we want from the other just through gestures, looks, and a few soft words. When we fight, she always says, "I'm so sorry... I'm a bitch... it's my fault really..."
I tell her it's my fault. I tell her there is no fault, but if there was, it is mine. I lie, and I don't tell her, it's your fault for looking for blame all the time. I don't say, I blame you for all the moments when I feel terrible, in an effort to keep a mental chalk-board scoring of the happy and sad moments in my life.
I don't say it's these moments which I remember when you're asleep, and you think I am.
I guess it culminated tonight in a little fusion of time and frustration. Mainly because it's at that stage when the novelty is gone, and we're feeling old. We're not young lovers anymore. We're a Couple. We're a Unit. We're like the TV Couples who play squash (tm) and volleyball (tm) together. You can be soccer-mom. I can be the little-league coach.
I'm lying and ranting here.
We knew the novelty of it was gone, and we didn't want to lose it, because it's the best thing ever.
I guess I shouldn't have been rude. I shouldn't be so sarcastic when I know she's sensitive to it. I mean, heck, I'm sensitive to it, too. But when I made some snide comment about it, about how it's all downhill from here, she and I were at each other's throats. Playing on each other's sensitivities. We knew we were alone from each other at this moment, but there was nowhere else to turn.
She stood there with her head against the window, and I knew she was silently crying. It was pitch black outside except for a few distant lights. Middle of the night arguments are a 90's invention, in my opinion. No one else needed a reason to stay up, right? Now we've got computers and 131 channels and a world at our fingertips without the need for injections to keep up Clean and Safe and Poison Free (tm).
She must have been thinking something along the lines of, "This is all that is out there for our generation now. This is all that remains for me. I am going to get old and I will die, and I will have a pension plan and security. I am loved, and I love, but why do I feel so hollow? Will this feeling be with me forever? I hope he doesn't try to touch me or I will shatter like a hollow ice sculpture."
Her words struck me hard, and I was ash. I was ash. A breeze would come and I would be gone, and people would think about me and wonder if I was real, or just something their minds made up once upon a time for entertainment. I was ash. No blood in my face, just a grey complexion that made me look heartless and dead and shrivelled like a piece of fruit left in the sun. I was not a pillar of salt, and I was not glass or eggshell or ice, but I was ash, because ash is a temporary state. After ash comes nothingness. You die, you turn to dust.
I didn't want this. I have enough sleeping disorders to know that nightmares are unparalleled when it comes to fear and hatred by human beings, because it's all in our heads, and it's all our creation, and only our creations can destroy us in the end, and we all know it.
Was I that to her?
I'd told her she was my sun, and she was my moon. She was my Black Star (tm) and she was all I needed. I'd say these things to sound romantic, and because it was the only way I could express to her that I did need her. I would say, "I am a deep sea diver, and you are my scuba gear and my oxygen tank."
And what was I to her? I was her nightmare.
I screamed at her, and I wanted to sound angry and hurt, and I wanted to make her feel that I loved her, she had hurt me. I wanted her to know that I think I understand what she was going through, I was going through something similar, only I would never try to describe it since I fear her rejection. I have everything I need in the world in her, and she is my electricity when I am on life support.
"I am not your fucking nightmare!"
In the end, I know it just sounded weak and scared, like the child who yells to the monster under the bed, "I am not afraid of you!" It was the anger a sibling expresses to their parents when they see that the brother or sister has been given a better Christmas present or more pocket money. It's not an angry noise, the, "Why does he get more??" It's pathetic, and every body knows that exactly what they mean is, "Do they get more because you care for them more?"
But what was I saying, in that tragic scream? Was it a pleading, a, "I wanted to be your fantasy and your dreams, but is this what I ended up being?" Or was it more like, "Can't I be to you what you are to me?"
It was all this, and something entirely different.
It was exhaustion, the exhaustion of hope. The candle in the window burning down until nothing was left. The sole person in an empty station, watching the last train slide out of view, waiting for it to move out of sight for no real reason, just because there was nothing else that could be done.
It wasn't the end of her and I, I guess. It was the end of the
beginning, though, and we both understood that at that moment. The
moment of nightmares and hope.