Setting about my day with my new plan in tow was slightly more difficult than I had originally imagined, as I glanced down at the now-cracked screen of my cell phone.  I paused for a moment, one foot planted firmly in a pile of gray slush, the other still on the sidewalk, and laughed uneasily at his latest text message, which was clearly intended for her and not me.

Heading home now…we don’t have money for karaoke tonight, do we?

Behind me (and unseen, fortunately, to the public), The Beast rose up again, placing two overly-firm hands on my shoulders and trying to rouse me to reaction. He did it on purpose, it muttered in my ear, just to get to you.

The Beast smiled coyly as the tension slowly crept up my neck and my grip tightened on the cell phone.  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and sucker-punched.

A whimper of shock and shame, followed by fleeting footsteps.  The Beast wasn’t going to win this time.

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“It’s just not fair to you,” he said, holding my face in his hands.  It was easy for me to forget that Seth was substantially uninformed of most of the goings-on in my life.

“Fairness,” I muttered, holding back the urge to laugh, “isn’t something that’s factored into most scenarios for me lately. It’s nothing I’m not used to.”  He kissed me softly, before jumping up nervously to leave.

I followed him reluctantly into the kitchen as he slid his shoes on, slowly.  He always removed his shoes when he stopped by, in instinctual consideration of my off-white carpeting.  It was one of the tiny little details that made him stand out to me.

“What do you expect of me?” he asked, looking up at me with a slight look of desperation in his eyes.

“I don’t,” I stated, without hesitation.  “I don’t think it’s really my place to have any expectations of you.”

I wasn’t putting on a façade, or trying to tell him something he wanted (or needed) to hear.  It was simply the truth – this unexpected emotional rumble inside me had caught me off-guard as well, and my instinct told me to simply sit on it.  By making no demands of him, a part of me felt more assured that the situation was still within my control.  There was still an innocence to it, and, for the most part, a tremendous amount of self-control on both our parts.  It was still relatively safe.

I never thought of where he went after he left me.  There was no point in it – it would surely drive me to an uncontrollably frustrating state that would leave me jealous and hopelessly wanting.  I was happy to exist in a sort-of fantasy state, where the thought of being with him was still a dream and not a reality.  It was…enough.

He turned for the door, and paused for a moment before turning back to me for one last embrace.  I stood, on my toes, with my face buried in his chest, already desperately wanting the next time, before letting him kiss me goodbye.

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Jeff and I sat upstairs, unwinding from our respective days at work and complaining about, well, just about everything as we shared the last of Jeff’s weed.  Just as we were about to agree on the most clever way to get someone fired (which we figured would be a clever yet obvious drug plant in said person’s desk), we were interrupted by the sound of a knock at the back door.

“Who could that be?” Jeff asked, slightly paranoid.  “I didn’t see anyone come up the driveway, did you?”  I looked out the window to find that there were indeed no cars in the driveway, aside from our own.  The landlord’s family had been fully moved into their new house across town, leaving me and Jeff as the sole occupants of the sprawling property.  For the time being, at least.

Mildly freaked out by the surprise visit, we quietly made our way downstairs, tiptoeing around corners and trying to peek out of the windows before answering the door.  Jeff manned the front of the house, scanning the front yard for signs of life, as I headed for the back door, where I was met by a disheveled looking man bearing a sack of some kind.

“You must be the new neighbors,” the sketchy man muttered.

“Ummm….no,” I said nervously.  I had never seen the man before, and was starting to grow concerned over his intimate knowledge of the house.  “We’ve lived here for years.”

“Oh, I figured you just moved in.  Well anyway, I brought you some dinner,” he said, handing me the sack.  Not wanting to be openly rude, I accepted the sack and offered some off-the-top-of-my-head excuse of having to return to my own affairs.  I shut the door, ensuring all locks were sufficiently engaged, and ran for the kitchen.

“Who the hell was that?” Jeff asked, watching the sleazeball slink off down the driveway.

“I don’t know…but he gave us…..this,” I said, holding up the bag for Jeff to see.  “What do you think it is?”

“Whatever it is, it’s bleeding.”

I threw the bag onto the kitchen table as Jeff grabbed a broom handle and proceeded to work the bag open, not wanting to touch it with his hands.  He stared silently at the bag’s contents for a minute.

“Well?” I asked, impatiently.

“It’s potatoes.  And raw meat.  Did I mention raw? Yeah, it’s raw.”

I grabbed the bag and looked inside, only to confirm that there was a large chunk of raw pork, which was unwrapped from it’s cellophane packaging, coupled with a few rogue potatoes.

“Maybe it’s fine,” I said, trying to be optimistic.

“Maybe it’s been poisoned,” argued Jeff.

“But really, who would do that?”

“Who drops off a sack of unwrapped raw pig meat??” Jeff laughed.  “Maybe he’s stalking you.”

“Well, he’s not doing a very good job,” I explained.  “He though we just moved in.”

Without a word, Jeff grabbed the sack and silently headed outside, where he gently placed the sack in the Taco-refuse-bin.

“Who does that?” I asked, as Jeff ran in the house to wash his hands (repeatedly).  “Who randomly gives out raw meat to strangers?”

“Maybe we should’ve eaten it,” Jeff moaned.  “I mean, it was a free dinner.”

“Go nuts,” I encouraged.  “I’m getting a pizza.”

An hour or so later, after gorging ourselves on a large pizza with ‘the works’, we pondered the manner in which the stranger had made his way to our door.  Neither of us had seen anyone walking around, and the thought of the sketchy pork man skulking around the empty unit next door bothered us severely.

“We need to check the perimeter,” Jeff said assertively.  “Find out how he got in.”

We grabbed a flashlight and headed out into the backyard, slowly making our way around to the opposite side of the house.  The empty apartment next door was quiet.  As we approached the side of the house I noticed a path between the house and the neighbor’s fence.

“That’s where the bastard’s getting in!” I whispered.  “What do we do? We can’t have him sneakin’ up on us.”

“We blockade it,” Jeff said, still a bit stoned from earlier.

“With what?”

Jeff roamed around for a few minutes, disappearing near the utility shed.  He emerged carrying a large Styrofoam cooler.

“This? We’re gonna keep him out with a cooler?” I asked.

“It’s the best we can do right now,” Jeff muttered.  “At least he’ll know we’re on to him.”

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“It was a funny sort of weekend, wasn’t it?” Derek said, generously spreading out the fresh bagels he’d brought with him.  “Weird vibes all around.”

“You’re telling me,” I muttered, diving into the bagels as if I’d not eaten since the last time Derek brought food.  “I’m still not quite sure I was the person who experienced my weekend.  A little too dramatic for my normal liking.”

The days leading up to Tuesday breakfast with Derek had been wrought with unsettling, vulnerable emotions which plagued me, continually, throughout most of my weekend.  The situation with Jon had come to a head (much as I had anticipated it might, though the emotional bee-sting was deeper than expected), leaving my seemingly-strong ego slightly tattered and very bruised.

“What was so dramatic about it?” Derek inquired innocently.  I had, up until that point, almost forgotten that he didn’t know about my strange little non-fling with the man who was never meant to be mine.  Then again, no one did, save for Soundman Sam (due largely in part to his geographical displacement and utter lack of knowledge base regarding that facet of my life).  Removing Jon’s involvement in my weekend drastically cut down on the level of expected drama, and I was left fumbling for my next words.

“I saw the Coworker,” I muttered, hoping this would be enough of a shock to fill in the dramatic gaps.  Derek chuckled a bit – not out of surprise, per se, but more with an air of expectancy…a hint of, ‘I told you so’.

“I hope to Christ you don’t refer to me to other people by some stupid nickname,” he laughed.  “If I find out you do, I’m gonna stinger splash your ass.  Now…do tell.”

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“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times, I DON’T EAT GRITS, BITCH!”

The rousing laughter from the table was broken almost instantly by the condescending bark of the heavily-made-up, aging and bitter waitress who was taking advantage of her one opportunity to pull rank on anyone.  She was not amused by Roger’s antics.

“One more outburst from you all and I’m gonna have to ask y’all to leave,” she growled, flipping her over-processed and bodiless ponytail as she stalked off angrily.

“Yeah, Roger,” I giggled.  “Now eat your damn grits and shut the fuck up!”

We had stopped just after midnight at the sixteenth Waffle House we encountered (Jim was counting) for much-needed caffeine and trans fats, and were somewhere in northern Arkansas, surrounded by just the type of people one would expect to run into at such an establishment.  Megan sat across from me, slouching in the tattered, faded red vinyl booth, incredibly happy that our little pit stop signaled the end of her driving contribution, poking around at a soggy stack of miserable little pancakes.

“There’s simply not enough money in the world to get me to consume this shit,” Roger moaned, half-drunk and probably still a little bit high.  He had driven us from Boston straight through West Virginia, and was now able to settle in for the remainder of the excursion.  “Whose idea was this place anyway?”

“Yours, princess,” Kevin quipped, throwing an overcooked bit of hash brown at Roger.

“Bullshit!” Roger yelled, jumping to his feet.  “Do I look like white trash to you? I would never do such a thing.”  Our waitress, Miss Congeniality, marched right over at the sound of Roger’s little outburst.

“Alright, that’s it. Who’s payin’ this check?” she snarled.  We pointed to Scott, who had remained silent throughout Roger’s antics.  “Well pay up, and then get on outta here.  And I don’t wanna see y’all back here again, ya hear me?”

“Why yes ma’am!” Roger shouted in his best mock-southern accent, standing at attention and saluting the dragon waitress.  “And I do apologize for this unfortunate inconvenience.”

Scott shoved some cash into the waitress’s hand before grabbing Roger by the collar and almost dragging him out of the restaurant.  We shuffled outside, laughing, where Scott was eye-to-eye with Roger.

“Do you think it was the white-trash thing?” Roger asked, staring back at Scott.  Scott burst into laughter.

“That might have done it, yeah.”

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“Wat’s going on?”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the text message from the Young One – the one that came, as usual, at about 10:30 on a Saturday night after each of us had had our chances at a night out.

I had called him on it once, a few weeks back, and insisted to him that I was not, in any way, his little booty call.  Feigning offense, he did his best to argue that his intentions were purely the opposite.  And yet, still – he persists.

The weekend before I had the luxury of being predisposed – albeit, having a reasonably mediocre time downtown – and was able to quell his poorly-masked request instantly.  On this particular weekend, however, he had caught me in the middle of a tremendously exciting solo screening of Sleepaway Camp.

There came an unsettling moment of indecision which caused my skin to crawl, as I chastised myself for even entertaining the notion of accepting his offer of a healthy round of string-less physical activity.  I certainly could have done with the entertainment (musing to myself about the last time I was so engrossed), but the aftermath was not something I was in the mood to suffer through.

The issue with the little boys was that, even though they moonlighted as these wanna-be-big-time-players, they were still quite sophomoric when it came to their concepts’ of women’s expectations, post-romp.  The Young One would linger – at times well into my Sundays, putting me in a foul state of mind for the remainder of the day.  He’d want to monopolize the last, few precious moments of my weekend with superficial embraces and teenage makeout sessions, while I desperately wished for the power to will him away with my mind.

I no longer had the desire nor the patience to take the Young One under my wing and school him on the ways of the wiser world.  The necessary time spent in his company certainly did not warrant that kind of effort on my part.  If he hadn’t already learned the rules of the booty call (even in its simplest tenets – never, ever, ever spend the night) by now, I was under no obligation to waste my time attempting to educate the wayward little soul.

I ultimately left it alone, deciding that no comment would be the safest route to take.  I spent the remainder of the evening, instead, pondering Cute Neighbor Boy and his cryptic, ambiguous behaviors over the chilled bottle of pinot that he did not stop by to share.

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At the sight of his cherry red BMW pulling into the parking lot, I rolled up my windows and switched off the ignition.  I hated waiting in that lot for Jason, but it was an agreed-upon happy medium in the almost-unmanageable distance between us.  I just wished that, for once, I wasn’t the one waiting in the car. 

I playfully hopped into his passenger seat, and just as I had sat down, he threw a disposable 35mm camera into my lap. 

“What’s this for?” I asked with a grin.  Surely, some sinister master plan was afoot. 

“Today, my dear,” Jason said slyly, pulling his sunglasses down slightly, “we are going to go mullet hunting.” 

Though I had never heard of such an adventure, I burst into giggles at the mere concept of what the name implied.  Always the consummate people-watcher, he had obviously ascertained with ease that this would be right up my alley. 

“Is it the proper season?” I asked. “Will we need permits?”  Grinning, he leaned over and kissed me sweetly on the cheek.  It never seemed to matter how long it had been since I’d seen him – I still got goose bumps whenever he kissed me. 

“I’ve got it all taken care of,” he assured.  “Now, where to? I have a feeling Lowell’s good hunting grounds this time of year.” 

………….

“Wait, wait, stop!” I shouted excitedly.  “There’s one!”

“Where?” he asked, attempting to scan the crowd and pull the car over at the same time. 

“Three o’clock,” I observed, pointing the way.  “I think it might even be a femullet!”   

As he parked the car alongside the only open stretch of curb for miles, I hopped out of the car to get a better view.  Confirming the sighting, I rushed back to the car. 

“It is! C’mon, let’s go!” 

“How are we gonna get this one?” he asked quizzically, pondering the cityscape for an excuse to take pictures under the guise of tourism.   

“Easy,” I stated.  I twirled a few steps in front of Jason, spinning my loose, floral skirt.  “So what do you think of my new outfit?” I asked loudly.  After a minute or two, he finally caught on to my plan and played along. 

“You look beautiful in it,” he swooned. “Let me get a picture of you in it!” 

I poised myself by a light post which overlooked the outdoor sandwich shop where the Femullet was lunching, positioning myself perfectly so that she was just behind me in the camera’s frame.  As he snapped away, a self-assured smile crept across his face. 

“Perfect, got it!” he proclaimed, grabbing my hand.  “Let’s go!”  

We ran back to the car as if passers-by were aware of our mission, where we finally collapsed into fits of laughter.  As we drove down the street, we happened upon a public beach where a large, extended Hispanic family function was seemingly taking place.   

“Your turn,” I laughed, spotting a handful of young men sporting our desired hairstyle.  “The hunt is on!” 

We casually strolled down to the water’s edge where I made Jason stand, casually, while I pretended to take a picture of him.  As I instructed him on where to stand, two of the Hispanic men crept casually into the background, smiling playfully.  The older of the two suddenly became quite brave, putting his fingers up in rabbit-ear-formation behind Jason’s head.   

I had managed to snap three or four shots before Jason suspected something was amiss and turned around to investigate.  At the sight of the men, he threw his arms up into the air, cheering excitedly. 

“Hahah! Yes!!!” he shouted, doling out high-fives to the men behind him.  Smiling, we waved goodbye to our mullet-ed friends and rushed back to the car.

“I don’t know how you did that,” Jason muttered, “but you’re a genius. Live mullet interaction.  Unbelievable.” 

“So, where to now?” I asked with a smile. 

“I’m thinking Nashua.”

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“Well, I don’t really see it as dumping you,” he reasoned, “more like we’re taking a break.”

“That usually involves both parties having a say in the matter,” I explained to him, making every attempt to curtail my desire reach through the phone, rip out his tongue, and whip his backside with it.  “I see it as you dumping me. It’s fairly simple, really.”

He stuttered for a moment, desperate to find something meaningful to say to keep me from hanging up the phone, before finally settling on a self-pitying and troubled groan.  “I really wish you’d look at it differently.”

I’d been dating The Young One for a mere three to four weeks, routinely reassessing the appropriateness of my decision to ignore the obvious age gap between us and attempting to assuage my fears of becoming a dirty old cougar, when a sudden twist of fate incited within him a decision to flee this little thing we had started.  With a maturity level that was unable to comprehend any proposed logic behind his decision, I simply couldn’t see how he expected me to wait it out while he ‘got his life together’.

Never one to accept wisdom from those who have walked in his shoes, it was pointless to try to explain to him just how long it actually takes for one to get one’s life in order (given the depth of chaos my own life was still immersed in).  It was pointless to question why, when life takes an unfortunate turn, he felt it better to cast me aside, blaming superficial circumstances and weak reasoning.  It was pointless to wonder why he chose to hurt me.

The overwhelming desire to point out the obvious to him was maddening – I wanted nothing more than to take him by the shoulders, shake him, and tell him that he was insane to think I’d sit idly by, waiting for him to decide to come back to me when we only had a miniscule amount of time under our collective belts anyway.  Just because he thought he was in love, doesn’t make it real.

“Listen,” I said, exasperated by the thought of him, “you can’t expect me to wait this out for you.  You made a choice, and in that process, you pulled a pretty hurtful move.”

“Abby, please,” he begged, “don’t just disregard what we have. Please.”

“I don’t have to,” I said flatly. “You already did that for both of us.”

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I decided to start a story for my niece, Olivia, based around her new friend Primrose, a scary-looking but much-loved dinosaur toy which is far beyond her three years of age but who was selected from piles of pretty, polyester-filled plush bears and rabbits and such. Here’s the beginning.

Once upon a time, in a small town in the southeast, a young, lonely dinosaur wandered the dark nighttime streets in secrecy (for as everyone knows, that’s the safest way for a young, lonely dinosaur to not be seen). He kept himself hidden, not to gain the upper-hand in ambushing unsuspecting menu items, no, as he was a vegetarian, but to protect himself from the Large Ones that always stampeded by with their intrusive and destructive ways.

The safest time was at night. The Large Ones seemed to retreat once the sun was well beyond the horizon (or what could be seen of the horizon, what with the strange and imposingly massive foreign monuments that blocked

out the sky), and all that remained were the nocturnal creatures, and the young, lonely dinosaur felt confident about his ability to fend off those. He even hoped to encounter a kind, warm heart within the midnight menagerie – a like mind, a friend, perhaps, to take away some of the loneliness. So far, all he had been met with were feathered lunatics whose eerie, squawking language he could not understand, and a four-legged beast with a flat face and bad breath who claimed he was called Max.

Max was nice enough, or at least the young, lonely dinosaur thought so, but he certainly wasn’t riding without training wheels when it came to know-how. They had

first met on a chilly, wet night when the young, lonely dinosaur had been noticed quietly huddling in the shelter of what he would soon find out to be the four-legged beast’s home.

The young, lonely dinosaur had heard the battle cries of the beast from within the home of some Large Ones, and remained perfectly still in the small, wooden structure he had happened upon, unsure of the nature of such wild calls. Motionless, he held his breath as the cries grew louder, and with a loud flap and a bang, he could tell that the devil making these noises was now outside with him. There were no thunderous footfalls, however, no charged up battle cries now – the beast approached the structure and poked its head inquisitively inside of it. The young, lonely dinosaur tensed up in fright as the beast’s jowls reached out to grab him.

“Hey! Watch the teeth!” the young, lonely dinosaur shrieked, catching the beast off guard and causing it to jump sharply, hitting its head on the top of the structure. “No need to get all bitey!”

The beast stood back for a moment, fearful, until, overcome with curiosity, it began to sniff furiously at the young, lonely dinosaur.

“Who are you?” the beast asked, running its wide, wet tongue over the young, lonely dinosaur, covering him in a stinky drool-film. “What are you doing in my house?”

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I could feel him there, that ill-intended inner critic who always seemed to be lurking at those inconvenient yet opportune moments, waiting just around the corner holding tightly to the other end of the tripwire.  I tried to ignore the whispers that kept urging me to give up, to abandon ship, but I was feeling vulnerable after having received some harsh criticism over the Leicester project earlier that day.

It seemed like an endless cast of characters, my (un)romantic life did; a script, a cheap off-Broadway production or, at times even, a badly-performed revival at some washed-up dinner theater somewhere off the highway.  I was stuck in the cycle, watching the lead roles change yet playing out the same scenarios with the same forced reactions and half-hearted efforts time after time, all the while maintaining some desperate hope that maybe, just once, the ending would change.

I could barely tell one bad date from the next, blending faces and names and histories and such until it was all a mashed-up giant man-mess, leaving me tired, frustrated and overwhelmed.  I desperately needed something to stand out – some bold soul to stand up in the crowd and stage the great walkout, saving me from the monotony of it all.  Lead the way, and show me your heart. Lead the way, today we will start.

Peering around the corner with a sly, self-assured and seedy grin, the vexatious inner critic waxed nostalgic, delicately reminding me of one pointless endeavor after another and the countless unmet expectations and disappointments we’d endured together.  I wondered why he tried to talk me out of things, since he obviously derived a sick pleasure from witnessing my various downfalls in such grand fashion.   He had been hanging around too much lately – wearing out his welcome and keeping me up at night rather than finding something more productive to do.

Perhaps if I surrendered my cause he would cease to find enjoyment in lingering.  Perhaps I should sleep on it. Perhaps I should simply dust off my steel-toed boots and forge ahead, trampling him in the process like an over-confident Spaniard in early July.

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