Despertar

forget about it

The whole thing about balls, that's about the only reason I'm glad I'm not a boy. On every other basis, I'd gladly swap.

*

Sometimes Marcus calls and wants to shoot the shit, casually, as though we're two people who met on a plane three years ago, exchanged phone numbers and agreed to keep in touch indefinitely at random intervals. He probes me for stories about school, my friends, Justin. He expresses what seems like genuine empathy when I throw him the tiniest, most cautious little bones of conversation. He cracks jokes and mentions things he wouldn't even know if we'd never slept together. It's obnoxious.

We exchanged five texts on Inauguration Day--my two, his three--and his last one read, and I quote, "I'll come up there and beat him up if he doesn't let you ride on his shoulders." Referring to Justin, in response to my lament about how crowded my neighborhood was quickly becoming, and how I was afraid I wouldn't be able to see anything over Justin's very high shoulders. (A detail I threw in because, honestly, I like reminding Marcus that Justin is about seven inches taller than he is. Which is nasty of me, but remember, Marcus took my virginity under false pretenses; I owe him about a thousand passive-aggressive putdowns.)

Marcus never sees the irony when he advises me on my love life. He literally does not see where coaching me not to put up with certain brands of dating bullshit poses a retroactive conflict of interest. Whenever Marcus calls, and I choose to answer, which is about thirty-three percent of the time, I always hang up feeling some negative feeling that falls somewhere on the spectrum spanning from Mildly Indignant to Completely Emotionally Wrecked.

Obviously, I should never answer the phone when Marcus calls. Obviously, I should just admit to myself that I haven't come far enough to react to him with any healthy perspective. I know, I know, I know. But: I have a serious problem with the notion that on this end of our shared history, which, differing perspectives notwithstanding, consists of the exact same series of events for both of us, we can exchange maybe two words, and while he hangs up feeling the same way he did before, I hang up feeling raw and regressive.

I don't want him to know the width of the margin by which he is winning. I don't want him to know he's still got his hand around my proverbial nuts, that I'm still afraid to breathe.