Ameliorate

I’ve been staring at my cell phone for the last forty-five minutes.

It has not stirred—not one iota. Yet, here I sit… occasionally pacing over to pick it up, then instantly set the damn thing right back down. I’m a vibration away from a cataclysmic event. I’m just trying to stay calm. Practice in futility, anyone?

It’s just a phone call. Yes, my hand is shaking like a Parkinson’s patient- my heart is a speed bag being ceaselessly pummeled in my chest… but it’s just a phone call.

The trouble is that I can’t really convince myself of that. The phone call is a conduit to untapped pain and horror beyond the comprehension of my rational mind. Or, at least, that’s what I presume it will be… the harbinger of some emotional apocalypse that I’ll be coping with for the next 3 to 4 years until I’m dead or able to delude myself into pseudo-satisfaction with lesser circumstances.

How do you leave someone for her own benefit? Can you rationally justify that? How do you assert reasonable doubt about your sanity without seeming depraved?

Or lethal for that matter?

Oh, I’m sorry dear… I love you so much that I’ll probably end up doing you some irreparable harm. I don’t have anything specific in mind… I just know that you probably won’t be breathing when I’m finished. I’ve never been one for half-measures.

I’m beyond obsession at this point. I’m not sure if there’s a clinical name for it, but I’m damn-skippy that it warrants one. The night of our first fight I tried on a refreshing drunken rancor that made De Niro at the end of Taxi Driver look like Donny Osmond. I also rambled down random hallways screaming her name like Brando in Streetcar. The problem was that I was in my apartment complex, not hers.

I say this, and yet I know I can’t extricate myself from this affair without having a minor meltdown. It’s impossible. It’s like trying to quit heroin cold-turkey because you’re afraid of what you will do to the drug… Does that make any sense? And will that sort of justification actually dissuade me when that first overwhelming urge hits? Not-fucking-likely.

I’m still face-fucking the girl, for God’s sake. And no, not the bored porn-star her throat is more amusing than her vagina because the soundtrack is more colorful brand of face-fucking… I mean that I literally cannot take my eyes off the girl’s face from the moment of penetration to the final trembling spasm of climax. The fastest orgasm I’ve achieved on record occurred on our first official date—and I live in mortal fear of topping it. Thirty seconds in and she issues this fevered moan while biting the right corner of her lower lip and immediately my dick is frothing like a fire-hose spewing full bore at a blazing inferno. Tell me that doesn’t cast an ominous pall over the relationship…

I guess I’m saying that I just can’t handle her. Or, that is what I’ll tell myself to justify it all in my head later. It’s because of her that I had to ruin the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. The truth is that she’s driving me insane by not being as overwhelmed by me as I obviously am by her. You can’t love a woman this much without a measure of self-control. It’s perilous—and for the both of us. For her, it’s like having an alcoholic as your designated driver… you’re depending on someone who’s absolutely incapable of controlling themselves normally to watch you behaving erratically and somehow deny their every natural urge that arises in the interim. It’s absurd.

Perfect example of her ambivalence and my inability to show restraint: We were walking back to my car after an average Friday night at the Denny’s when I lurched into the “L” word. I was holding her hand, desperately fighting to keep my Moons Over My Hammy from resurging into my esophagus, and I just managed to catch her looking at me out of the corner of my eye. Her hair is the goth-girl cheap-o dyed crimson I adore on women… thus, when suffused in the amber glow of a streetlight it tends to radiate a slight halo. Due to this, she caught fire in my periphery like a transfigured angel— her lips curled into a smile like burning paper, and that blaze spread from her face into my chest and forced the words out of my mouth as a fireman pushes a child through the window of a burning building.

“It’s ridiculous how much I love you, Layla.”

Her lips parted gently, moist as a dew laden flower at dawn, as she turned to look me in the eye. I stood breathless as a man before a firing squad, and in place of the words of reciprocity I was so desperate to hear she uttered:

“Awww… thank you.”

A retort like that will deflate a libido faster than a balloon that’s been penetrated with a pin. It’s telling enough that I was the first one to say the word, but to be met with such a patronizing retort… It scarred me.

Can you stay in a relationship where the love is so preternaturally one-sided? It’s like a pimple on the tip of your nose that you hesitate to pop because you’re afraid of the scar—yet you just can’t shake the feeling that everyone is staring at it, judging you… It completely offsets any confidence you may display to the contrary: inside, you’re coming apart at the seams.

Fifty minutes.

I have been engaged in this deliberate little dance with my cell phone for nearly an hour, and nothing has been accomplished.

I mean, typically I call her the minute I leave work. She’s bound to suspect something at this point. Maybe she’ll think that I’m seeing someone else… or that I’ve been in some tragic car-accident. At the very least she’ll be wondering if something is up—there’s no way that she couldn’t at this point.

And yet… she … hasn’t… called… me… either.

That’s strange… You’d think that the one time your boyfriend (who dutifully checks in the instant he’s fulfilled his daily obligation to his employers) doesn’t call, you might express a little interest in discovering the motivation for the deviation. I could be lying in a ditch somewhere, desperately clinging to life—cell phone just beyond my outstretched fingers... Does she care?

Apparently, she does not.

My phone has been lying dormant on that damned kitchen counter for nearly one hour. I left work nearly two hours ago, and my silence hasn’t so much as elicited a concerned text message. Do I mean so little to her? Here I am ensconced in an effusive rant about over-indulging in my passion for the woman and I don’t even warrant a fucking phone call! My God… maybe she’s the one screwing around on me. It’s certainly within the realm of possibility. I mean, considering how we started this relationship, how can I not expect the worst?

Who sends nude pictures of themselves via cell-phone as a means to garner interest from the opposite sex? Honestly? Granted, it absolutely worked, but still… I suppose that it says something about me in that I was not only ensnared by the pornographic flash cards, but I also reciprocated. And let me tell you—getting a flattering shot of one’s penis with a camera-phone is not the easiest task imaginable… You’ve gotta get decent lighting, proper framing so that it’s impressive, but not intimidating… I digress.

I suppose we’re two beasts feasting from the same trough. However, she was the one that initiated the short, sharp dive into the gutter. I just followed her down… Yes, her conversations bored me… so I stopped texting. That doesn’t mean I need a one-way ticket to tit-town just to get me to come back around… I wasn’t so overwhelmingly engaging that she just had to keep me interested at all costs. There are plenty of fish in the sea—especially when you’re using stink bait. So, it’s not irrational that I presume she’s out lubricating every piston on the east side of Detroit for the fuck of it.

Two years ago I got into a relationship with a girl because she spilled beer on my corduroys at a frat party and offered to help clean me up. That’s all it took. One spill, a little flirtation and ten minutes later I’m pouring club soda on an undulating mass of flesh, blood and bullshit that was siphoning my cock like a fugitive with an empty gas-tank. Is it serendipity? Is it temporary insanity? No, we pass it off as some contrived ambiguous state of intoxication that we label as love.

Love is just one giant con segueing into another… a river of deceit that we have to ford sans paddle. We sell ourselves with our aesthetic, or our personality—and yet, in spite of it all, we’re like a used car salesmen peddling a lemon. We know we’re hurling damaged goods back into the market, but we don’t care. You just have to get the person off the lot with it… Then it’s their problem. If it breaks down: “Sorry, we made no guarantees about the quality of our product.” We’ve got to make a living, or die trying.

Perhaps I’m being used to facilitate daily activities that she would otherwise be ill-equipped to perform. Need a ride to work? Fuck the boyfriend. Looking for a hot meal free of charge? Fuck the boyfriend. Who’s to say that every relationship isn’t, in essence, a bartering system in which sex is exchanged for goods and services?

At the end of the day perhaps we’re all just using each other just to get by… She’s using me physically, and I’m using her emotionally. She gives me a definition: at the end of the day, Layla loves me. I’m the man Layla loves; Or the man Layla cares enough about to lie about loving; Or the man Layla won’t even take the time to call in order to lie to him about loving him. Fuck…

Sixty minutes.

Two hours of tedious deconstruction under the bridge and I’m not once centimeter removed from the spot I inhabited at the outset. So much for evolution. Maybe I ought to eat the danger-end of a twelve-gauge and decorate my walls with what’s left of my sanity—at least then I’d have connected with another human being on a primal level. I’d ruin someone’s Friday night and cause them to get slightly nauseous at the sight of Cherry Jell-O forevermore.

I guess I feel like I’m driving at full speed past a dead-end sign without any care or concern for my well-being. She’s just the cul-de-sac where my careening little death-trip will end. I just can’t be that irresponsible for my own actions anymore.

I can’t shake the image that she’s out there pining for someone else in the way I’m longing for her. I wish I could. It would be nice not to presume every word that escapes her lips is a lie. It would be nice to feel as though you can get what you give in this life.

And thus we reach the inexorable conclusion that set me on this chaotic carousel to begin with: Maybe I should just address the white elephant in the room... Perhaps it's best to get it straight from the horse's mouth, as the saying goes. Just ask her, "Was I nothing more than a one-night-stand that overstayed my welcome?" and be done with it. The emotional equivalent of tearing off a band-aid… It will damn near destroy me, but better to hear it from her lips and try to move on than to agonize over it every time I look at the fucking phone.

All of this is conjecture is condemned to be moot, though.

Sure, it’s just a phone call. Static transfer between two points of reference… It shouldn’t be this complicated…

However, saying it should be easy to make a phone call is like saying it should be easy to pull the trigger on a gun. You have to realize that the impediment has very little to do with the mechanics… and everything to do with the trajectory.