Declined

It's hard to remember, being that it was so long ago and so much has passed since, but I'm pretty sure it was hot outside when I met her. Not the standard brand of heat a lot of places have to offer, with mere high temperatures, but the special strain of heat Texas brings to the table where the air is so laden with humidity that the air begins to shimmer in the distance and the surroundings seem to melt and blur around you like an M. C. Escher painting.

I feel strongly about it being hot because I was embarrassed for sweating in front of her like John Belushi while she remained untouched by the heat, really untouched by everything around her. It occurs to me that it might very well have been a neutral 70 degrees and that I wasn't really sweating but rather became nervous upon meeting her.

The first time I saw her it was like waking up for the first time. She laughed at me because my ties didn't match my clothes on account of my colorblindness. Her smile was goofy because, back then, she had too many teeth and hadn't grown into her own mouth yet.

I have never tried harder to stay in a memory before, to stay blissfully buried in the pure innocent nostalgia. But even as she approaches to sit down in front of me in the memory, reality flickers and other memories surface, coercing me into reliving more undesirable times. She smiles at me, noticing my horrible blue tie with the old school Windows 95 flying toasters and it's chromatic differences to my black shoes, green oxford shirt and white pants. I can't really be too embarrassed because otherwise I never would have met her. I wonder momentarily how things would have been different, had I simply not been wearing a tie maybe she never would have spoken to me and I wouldn't be here.

Her smile flickers in front of me, everything changing around her as well. It isn't hot anymore, the obliterating and unfriendly, dickish rays of the sun have relented, replaced instead with the unforgiving tendrils of the deep Texas winter seeping into the car I was now in. I remember this day.

It wasn't all that long ago. I was sitting in my car outside her house, silently muttering obscenities to myself, shocked really at my stupidity for even being there. My right hand endlessly scrolled through the 19,000 song expanse on my iPod, never finding anything suitable to quell the sickening feeling that something was underneath my skin which was only exacerbated by the infuriating clicking clatter of the iPod's clickwheel, a noise that would definitely stop were I to simply select a song. I give up on music altogether.

Yelling breaks the silence, a prelude, as usual, to her leaving the house. Her parents worry frequently, with good reason, as to the nature of her activities. She slams the door like I've seen her do so many times both to me and to others. I haven't seen her in a while. She wears more makeup now. Not too much. Not really my personal preference but she still looks pretty, unlike many girls that don't wear makeup that often who, in simple ignorance, put too much on and look like whores.

Her teeth don't look goofy anymore. None of her is goofy anymore. There's something solemn about the way she carries herself now, almost a tragic quality to her movement like looking at a wild animal that's been in a cage for too long, a wild bordering on defeated quality in her eyes. Once she's in my car I can smell her perfume again which brings up just plenty of unacceptable things to think about at the moment, although, admittedly, none of it was sexual in nature.

It's not so much awkward in the car on the way to wherever it was we were going so much as it was a comfortable silence between two people who didn't really need to talk. I wasn't sure why, after what happened, she decided to invite me to lunch today. Well, she said she wanted to talk but I wasn't really sure what about considering I had said all I needed to say to her while she threw airplane bottles of Ketel One vodka at me.

Directions are quietly muttered to me as she glances wistfully out the window at other cars. "I'm glad you don't wear the ties anymore. They made you look ridiculous."

"Shrug. Got you to talk to me, didn't it?"

"Because I thought you were retarded and might need help putting the straw in your mouth."

"Gee, I appreciate the concern for my well-being. Really, it's touching."

"Whatever park here, I have an errand to run."

Leaning forward, I see the outline of the Northside branch of Planned Parenthood set against the cloudy backdrop of the winter sky. I don't recall the Planned Parenthood offering lunches. Nor do I consider any trip to this place an 'errand'. Damn flippant woman.

Upon entry we were chastised for our tardiness while we stood, cringing ever so slightly, underneath the decaying yellow-brown acoustical tile. A gentle but persistent hum from the overhead fluorescent lights disrupted my thoughts. The carpet, which amounted to being a thin piece of rough fabric stretched across the entirety of the rooms, was a dark blue with specks of white interspersed throughout. Two Mexican nurses and an overweight, heavily acne-d white woman with the slightest hint of facial hair were wo-manning the counter, tending to the pre-teens in need of procuring hasty
abortions at cost.

This is my first time here and I'm slowly realizing why. Walking mechanically forward, down the long hallway of many a dead fetus, I feel an intense pressure on my head and I wonder if it might explode outward, ending my confusion and awkwardness. This is probably a panic attack, I think. I must have splendid genes.

My forward progress is stopped by someone's hand on my chest. "Look. You wait out here while I have my appointment. Then we can go have lunch if you want." Thank God, I'll definitely be hungry after watching the midday abortion. She winks at me and kisses me on the cheek before whispering something in my ear. Due to my immaturity I decided to not watch as her uterus was forcibly sucked empty.

I wanted so badly to yell at her and ask her why I was even here. But when the door opened and I saw her sitting up in the bed during the recovery period following the in-clinic aspiration procedure, I forgot everything and just stared at her, fragile and sedated, all barriers and walls between us gone. She clutched at her stomach for something that wasn't there anymore, shivers traveling throughout her body. Until she was cleared to leave by the crack team at Planned Parenthood, I sat with her on a crappily molded blue plastic chair that had a kind of constant bobble to it, threatening at all times to ruin the serious situation of the post-abortion misery with the childlike wonder of a Hippity Hop ball.

The memory dissipates and I'm really outside a hospital, back to the wall on the ground with a cigarette in my left hand and her blood on my right just in between my thumb and forefinger. I haven't smoked any of my cigarette but it's gone now, the only evidence being a line of ash on my charcoal corduroy pants.

Thinking I've been away from the commotion long enough, I dust off my once pristine leg attire and head back to the hospital where I know she's waiting, innocently unconscious despite the trace flecks of cocaine still coating the underside of her nostrils. On the path back to the automatic sliding doors and the smell of sick and antiseptic, I thought about what she whispered to me: "I don't think it's yours."