Walk
“Go,” I think she said. I was very sure what I said did not work—which is to say, my attempts at charming this woman did not allow me a more gradual opportunity to inseminate her heart and mind and well if I must be completely honest, her sense of identity.
I was still hopeful that it was merely a game of extents. Maybe I just didn’t emphasize the rise of brow or the fact that I read books. Maybe I mumbled through something too fast and she mislabeled me as a satanist. Everything was all happening too fast and to be completely honest I was reliving every moment of rejection prior, beyond that of a sexual nature. All the moments English teachers had no idea what I was saying or all the ill opportune moments I have said the word ‘love’ to people debriefed that love was, in fact, a nuclear weapon.
“Would you go, please?” she said, filled to the brim with passive aggressive rage that she would signal out via 3 sets of 160 characters to her friends who would gasp and judge me the next time I walked through a crowded room. The biggest tragedy of my life is our culture does not permit us to empathatically share resentment with a wronged person when it was you that did the wronging.
Truth be told I would much rather walk over to their perspective, look at me—the sheepish, obnoxious idiot who did that stupid thing that was awful, and just boo me. We would boo in unison and maybe that rapport we can build through the equal loathing of me would allow me to still get what I want. But for some reason that mode of thinking is simply inoperable in our culture.
Why can’t I just immediately shift to the empathic listener when, in the moment before, I said something nobly sexual that missed the mark? You say “How could you!” and I say, “I know obviously the media has given him a false impression on the boundaries of women—want to get coffee later?”
Identity is a sham. Now that I know that the person who forthrightly tries to fornicate with you is not the person you find most attractive, why can’t I be the one who maximizes on this revelation and simply pretends to be disinterested in you until you scoot your butt all up on me when you are drunk and music with a beat that doesn’t intimidate you plays?
Why can’t I be the crowded room? The girl you text, the guy you hate—why am I not you? Why are you doing this? This exclusive-or is simply nonsense. I can’t say all these thoughts within the critical interval of time to prevent you from feeling your agency violated. I can’t pontificate now. I am not the one that gets to love you. I lose.
I don’t smile, I don’t frown. I lose. I walk orthogonal to your plane of sight. Roll credits. Game over. The end.
