Chelsea Martin - Even Though I Don't Miss You

I'm jealous that that's the way it works for protagonists in novels.

I guess I'm still coming to terms with the fact that when I walk out of a room the story line continues in the room I just left instead of following me around like a security camera.

Sometimes you would look at me in this way that said, "I haven't heard a thing you've said in three years," and then you would make a joke about how shitty my new recipe was.

Well if you hate my new recipe so much why don't you get a restraining order against it?

I feel heartbroken today, but I don't know. Sometimes I get that way when I'm fucking hungry.

Sometimes it seems like the whole day is spent listening to songs about you. I think of what you might be doing in the world at that particular time, and I try to imagine you doing it. I try to think of something to say to you while you do this imaginary activity, and I slur the most important part.

I'm visualizing the letters that make up your name, but my brain has written it in Courier and the font size is too small and I feel irritated by it.

At a bar, you touched my knee repeatedly.

I happen to believe that people outside of myself can't incite feelings in me, that the feelings I am capable of feeling are the ones that I will feel when my body finds that it is the time to feel them, regardless of who happens to be near or against me at the time.

The touching seemed to be accidental at first, a very slight touch with the back of your hand during dramatic gesturing during climactic points in our conversation. We were drinking whiskey.

I said, "Happiness is my new favorite thing to talk about because it makes me feel horrible."

We talked about the different ways happiness is portrayed in books and movies. Finding happiness, losing happiness, cultivating happiness.

You said, "Happiness is so nice that it almost makes life worth living."

My friend Megan was talking to your less attractive friend. She had started drinking before we went out so that she would have the courage to appear composed and confident in front of you, but ended up talking to your less attractive friend and looking a little sad and drunk.

I attempted to make a non-pathetic and non-convoluted smile for Megan but a pathetic and convoluted one was all I could come up with. She didn't look at me and I thought maybe I shouldn't've smiled at all.

You made constant eye contact as you talked to me and your eyes were both too close together and too close to my eyes, which are having trouble figuring out what to look at.

Everything I said to you was so funny that I didn't want to stop talking to you and miss any of the funny things that might come out of me.

It is something to consider, if we're making a list things to consider, that most relationships are mirrors of yourself, and that those who you choose to be around is largely dependant on what you want to see in yourself at that time. There wasn't even enough time to say all the funny things I was thinking of, so I began excitedly typing them into my phone.

You said, "Who are you texting?"

I said, "I'm not texting."

You said, "I have the confidence to talk to you about happiness because I am drunk and because you gave me a nickname earlier today."

I said, "What was the nickname?"

You answered, or began to answer, but I couldn't hear the answer over the increasing volume of the bar noise.

You said, "Do you have a lot of ex-boyfriends?"

And I said, "No."

You said, "Do you stalk them on the internet?"

"No."

You said, "Yes you do. Everyone does."

I said, "I don't."

You said, "You don't go on their Facebook pages and stalk them?"

And I said, "I've been to their Facebook pages but not very often."

You said, "Yes you do. Everyone does."

And I said, "No, I don't. You're projecting."

And you said, "I'll admit it. I stalk my ex-girlfriends on Facebook. Everyone does it. I'll admit I do it."

I felt this compassion for you suddenly, which isn't something I feel a lot. I imagined you alone in your apartment, masturbating and trying to write an online dating profile based on the clues about yourself you think you've found on your ex-girlfriends' Facebook pages.

I said, "I don't know. I don't think so."

At the bar, I ordered another whiskey, even though I wanted beer, because I had told everybody that I was gluten-free and we had this whole conversation about how I couldn't drink beer. My stupid whiskey came and I stupid drank it.

"I wrote a story," you said, in a tone that indicated to me that you thought you had revealed something intimate about yourself.

If we were actors I think the camera would zoom in a little to appreciate the calculated tempo of my eyes as they shift from Point A (the top of your left shoulder) to Point B (your left eyebrow) to Point C (a hair on your chin) to Point D (a freckle on your cheek).

Megan and I had been on her porch earlier, sharing nostalgia for when we were teenagers, for when we lived together and shared everything, yelled goodnight to each other from our rooms on opposite sides of the apartment, and fought about the chore chart. She said we would never have the same closeness again.

On her porch I thought she was referring to our proximity, but I was beginning to think she meant something else.

I said, "What is the story about?"

It had been a few minutes since you touched my knee, and I wished that you would touch it, and you did touch it, and I felt silly for having wished it, and I wished you hadn't've touched it. You touched it again later and I felt silly again, but to a slightly lesser degree.

Once when we were fighting I went around the apartment pretending to water the plants. When I was done I said, "I've watered all the plants no thanks to you." A few days later I remembered that I hadn't actually watered the plants, and I checked them and they were very dry. I was mad that you hadn't thought of watering the plants, even after the comment I had made a few days prior about you not watering them. So I pretended to water all the plants again and picked a fight with you about how I shouldn't even have to water the plants since they were mostly yours. A few days later I was mad about something else but I checked the plants again. The plants were looking pretty bad so I said, "The plants are dying, I guess I'll water them like always."

I remember I had said, "Do you hate me?"

And you had said, "Yes." Then you said, "I hate you."

I drank two full glasses of water, one after the other, because my body couldn't cry while it was drinking water. To believe in evolution is to believe that these kinds of bodily responses have somehow supported the survival of our species.

Before the do-you-hate-me-yes-I-hate-you, I felt like we were living some kind of Truman Show rip-off, in which I was an actor hired to make you believe certain things about your life, and you were Truman, except that you were cognizant the whole time of the fact that I was acting. But we kept living this way because neither of us wanted to talk openly about the situation for fear of what might happen if we were both aware that we were both aware that we were both aware.

I thought I was done writing about you after I did a Find and Replace for your name in all my Word documents and replaced your name with forward-slash. After the Find and Replace, I felt like I was only one person again. It felt bad, like nobody else was me with me. You weren't taking part in my being anymore so I was only myself. I don't know how else to say it.

It didn't turn out to be a very practical choice to do the shitty things I did to you. I didn't consider that I might grow into someone who could no longer rationalize treating someone so poorly. And writing poems isn't really the most efficient way of relieving guilt.