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This movie is two hours and five minutes long. We have spent one hour and fifty-five minutes not kissing.
My aesthetic is aggressively, unapologetically basic.
I wonder if he retains this same pleasant expression when he chops people up into bits and slides their oozing remains down a cutting board into his trunk.
It’s sexist to assume I wouldn’t know how to fix leaky hoses and sanding belts and whatever else makes a car go vroom. He should assume that all of my lies are true.
The truth is that I don’t think any two people both feel one hundred percent in love with each other at the same exact time, all the time.
I’m a miserable cynic (a newer development) and a dreamy romantic (always have been), and it’s such a terrible combination that I don’t know how to tolerate myself.
If he asks me what’s wrong and my issue isn’t one he can make go away with a few reassuring words, Nicholas gets frustrated.
you can’t tell men about your unfixable problems, because they’ll want to fix them and not being able to do so fries their wiring.
On Valentine’s Day we sat in separate rooms and tagged each other in gushing Facebook posts. We don’t need to say sweet words in person because we know what Real Love is.
now I have nowhere to point my anger because he’s Over It, which means he’s won.
My engagement to Nicholas Rose is a game of chicken.
Magnolia Rose, my greatest hero for refusing to stop going by Mrs. Rose after the divorce even though her marriage to Harold only lasted a year and didn’t bear any fruit. She’s currently living in Key Largo with husband number five, who’s twenty years her junior and nephew of the guy who invented Marshmallow Peeps. She has fifteen parrots living in an aviary that’s the size of my bedroom and they’re all named after murderers on Law & Order. I know this because she added me as a Facebook friend, probably to needle Deborah, who has twice tried to sue Magnolia for emotional distress caused by
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Nicholas’s groom figure will be the knock-off Spider-Man from the dollar store, Tarantula-Boy. I’ll be represented by a half-melted pillar candle with googly eyes, and everyone Deborah knows and loves will have to see. When Nicholas cuts the cake, one of my googly eyes will slide off like an omen. I’ll smile at him with my red horror mouth and wild stare that will make him detest the color of champagne for all time, and his blood will curdle.
I’m a loyal fan of the Steelers. They’re my favorite sportsball team and I would die for them.
“We’re not having children,” I declare. “I’m barren. I lost my uterus in a Ponzi scheme.”
“I don’t like your spaghetti. It tastes like nothing.” Whatever. He’s just giving me an excuse not to cook. “I don’t like your dumb How to Train Your Dragon tie.” He’s so proud of that tie, because it features Toothless the dragon. A clever pun when you’re in the teeth profession. Rage burns a red rash across his cheekbones. “You take that back.”
I wish he’d flip a coin to decide the fate of our relationship while he’s at it. Heads, we break up. Tails, we flip the coin again.
I only see pictures of beautiful women with bangs when I do not have bangs.
“How’d we even meet?” I marvel. He wipes one eye with a knuckle, grinning crookedly. “I picked you up at a farmers’ market. From the top of the pile you looked nice. Wasn’t until I brought you home that I found out you were completely rotten on the inside.”
He follows up with, “Just as beautiful as the moment we first saw each other from across the room. On visitor’s day, at the prison.”
I drag my feet on purpose, but he holds me against his side and lifts so that he can kind of glide me over the blacktop. I kick my dangling feet to leave scuff marks. This is how I’ll die: slightly unwilling but ultimately lazy.
His expression is so scornful, I flinch. “Naomi, if the point were a meteor hurtling straight toward the earth with the power to destroy us all, you’d still miss it somehow.”
“Let’s go!” he calls up after a few minutes. “We have to go get your car! What the fuck do you want for dinner?” “I fucking want pizza!” I holler. I’ve wanted some since the son of a bitch got it delivered. “Fine! I’ve got a fucking coupon for Benigno’s, anyway!” “Great! I fucking love Benigno’s!”
You’re going to figure out one of these days that I can tell when you’re starting to disassociate, and it’s the most heartbreaking experience I’ve ever had. It’s nonstop. It keeps on happening. I try to bring you back to me every time you go to leave, off into your own head where I’m not allowed.”
All I know is that it’s a bad idea to fulfill your physical needs if you won’t fulfill my emotional ones.”
I make my voice tremble. I am the victim of horrendous misdeeds.
“Go ahead and wear pajamas to dinner, Naomi. You think that would bother me? You can go out dressed as Santa Claus and I wouldn’t care.” Now I genuinely am insulted. “Why wouldn’t you care?” He raises his eyes to mine. “Because I think you’re beautiful no matter what.” Ugh. That’s really low, even for him.
His quiet laugh sucks one year from my life span. “Are you all right, honey?” he calls up, sweet as cotton candy. “Shut up. Go draw your mother a bubble bath.” “You’re obsessed with my mother.”
It’s adorable how he assumes I’m in here making myself pretty instead of smearing a pentagram on the floor in my own blood and casting hexes on him.
“Don’t let me die here. I want to be somewhere warm when I go.” “Yeah, better ease into those warmer temperatures. It’ll get a lot hotter once you arrive at your destination.”
Messing with them could be fun, Naomi, if I were in on the joke, too. You forget, I know better than anyone what it feels like to be smothered by Deborah Rose.”
“I kind of hoped we’d be like partners in crime, sort of. When Mom’s trying to sink her claws into me and I can’t get away on my own, you’d have my back. The two of us, a team.”
Real Nicholas hasn’t said any of this. But Imaginary Nicholas is an amalgamation of realistic predictions based on callous things he’s said to me in the past, so I easily hear his voice shape those words. It’s not fair to be hurt or angry over something he didn’t even say, especially since the words I put into my own head are all true, but knowing he potentially could say it—and probably will—is enough to make me sink into a dark silence that I don’t rise from for the rest of the ride home.
“What are you making?” he snickers. “Farfaccine.” “That’s not a thing.” “It’s my favorite food ever. I talk about it all the time; not my fault you don’t pay attention.”
I have zero job offers and one fiancé too many. I have an abundance of odious fiancé. How am I going to get rid of him? I cannot marry this mama’s boy.
Nicholas’s voice ran through my head: Don’t get any ideas. I got lots of ideas. My ideas had ideas.
Something that sucks about being part of a couple: Your partner has veto power and you don’t get to just flow wherever the wind takes you. You’re not allowed to have kids or pets unless both of you are on board. You can want a dog more than anything in the whole world but if your partner says no, you’re out of luck.
“Oh, shut up. Anyone would be lucky to have me. I’m a prize.” “You’re the trophy they give to last-place losers.”
I am learning at this very moment in time that tormented English literature professor who’s just hit rock bottom is my specific type.
“Lie still!” I command. “I deserve to win this.” “You deserve tapeworms.”
For someone whose gaze has the power to compress souls into diamonds and diamonds into dust, I know he’d taste like spun sugar if I licked across his tongue.
It feels like he’s always leaving right when I want him to stay. When I need him here and he leaves, I lose something every time, over and over. He takes it from me when he goes. Always going. He’s never going to belong to me. He’s never going to want to stay with me. I’m never going to be enough.
Nicholas is a prideful man. He’ll stay out here until spring and catch a frog. Emaciated down to fifteen pounds, he’ll thrust the frog in my face. See!?
I’ve been withholding nice gestures to punish him for not giving me enough nice gestures, and just look at how well that attitude’s panned out for us.
“I’m here, okay?” He grasps my shoulder and squeezes gently. “These aren’t platitudes. I’m right here. And I want to listen. Whenever you’re sad, I want to hear why. I want to know what you’re feeling, all the time, so I can share those feelings with you.”
He plays Nightjar (on my account, so that he can play God with my trident and exclaim, “Hey, you have to come look at this! I’m a unicorn! Look, Naomi, I have a horn!”) while I read Riverdale fan fiction on Tumblr, and it’s mellow and ordinary and achingly perfect.
I tried to keep him at a safe distance where he could only see the decent parts of me and it made us both miserable. I inadvertently let him in to see the ugly parts but instead of running away like I’d counted on him to do, he wrapped his arms around all of that ugliness and didn’t let go.
In my head, I’ve been assuming that when Nicholas says I don’t need to work, what he means is that any job I’d qualify for is so beneath his notice that I might as well not work at all. In Nicholas’s head, all he’s done is say, Here I am, here I am. Be anything! It doesn’t matter if you don’t make much money, because I’ll take care of you. I’ll let you need me. I’ll be your rock, whatever happens. Spread your wings, you can always fall back on me.
“Relearning you has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
