Week 2: Throw Back the Little Ones
Oh, no. You did not just call me. You aren’t even worth the courtesy of getting your contact information in my phone, because I cut you off. And yet, I know your number anyway, and you called me.
This time, I thought that I’d shaken you off. We last spoke in December 2010 on an airport shuttle. I had “forgotten” to put your number into my brand new phone, so I had no idea whose calls I had spent the last few days ignoring. “Who is this?” I asked when I finally picked up the phone.
You identified yourself.
“Of course.” I realized that these calls fit into the pattern that you use when you want to get back together with me. You call a couple of times a day, never leaving messages, until you break me down enough to convince me to answer the phone. “Why are you calling?”
“You were pretty harsh with me the last time we talked. I was wondering why.”
You had a fair point. During that phone call, I had yelled, “Stop calling me!” then hung up immediately. In my defense, what else is a girl supposed to do after ignoring at least ten phone calls from someone with an inability to understand that “breaking up” does not mean “disappear for a while and then start calling again out of the blue”?
“I didn’t want to date you anymore,” I told you. “I wanted to be clear on that.”
“Why not?” you asked.
“We wanted different things. You just wanted sex. I wanted a relationship, and when I told you what I wanted, you said you were scared I’d push you away if you got close to me.” Spending five hours on an airplane had robbed me of any ability I might have to mince words. “We’re never going to want the same things.”
“Oh. Well, maybe we can get coffee sometime,” you suggested.
“I’m seeing someone else. I’m happy with him.”
“As friends?” you asked.
“Maybe,” I said, although I had never thought of you as a friend. Friends remember each other’s birthdays. Friends don’t refuse to let me see their apartments. Friends say things to each other with more emotional substance than, “ohhhh, that feels so good.” But I had spent enough time on this airport shuttle fighting.
I thought I had cut you away for good that night, but two years later, your number is on my phone. I know your pattern. I know that I cannot wait you out, so I decide to face you down. I press the number to call you back.
“Hey,” you say. You have a warm voice. Of course you do. You can be so charming when you know you don’t have me anymore and you want back in my good graces.
“Is this you?”
“Yeah. How are you?”
“A little bewildered,” I tell him. “It’s been over two years. Why are you calling?”
“I wanted to see how you were,” you answer.
We’ve been here together before, to a place where academic pressures have broken me down. When it seems like no one will raise a hand to put me together again but you, and you give me honeyed words about how you want to know how I’m doing, I find myself forgiving your transgressions and tumbling back into bed with you. I know I shouldn’t do it, but you don’t think I’m a miserable failure when I throw myself around on top of you, and I need an escape from my failure to make the moot court board and my mountains of homework.
If I was still twenty-one, perhaps I would be willing to follow you down again. But I have seen every inch of the place where you would take me. I walked its contour lines, paced its borders, and climbed its highest mountain in search of sustenance. I found nothing. I may starve for affection now, but you only offer mirages to lure me into that broken land with you.
“I’m-” I reach for my script. “Not interested. I don’t want to date you again. And we were never friends.”
“I’m sorry that you feel that way.”
I hang up. I have nothing more to say to you. I don’t need to make you agree with me, for that will dilute the clarity of my message. I briefly castigate myself for my harshness, but then set it aside. I spent too much time trying to be nice to you as you gave me nothing back. You need to leave me be so that I can find someone who wants to be in a relationship with me.
So why do I have a feeling that you will call again in one, two, five years and complain that I was mean to you?