Backyard Grill

         “Aww man that smells so gross.”  I look down at the bleeding meat in front of me.

         “What are you talking about, do you mean the steak?” Tyler looks over at me.  This is going to be wonderful; I should have never volunteered to help him with the grill.  I could have made some wonderful mashed potatoes or asparagus, but no, I had to try to be the eager to learn girlfriend and help with the steaks.  Now he’s going to go on about how meat’s delicious and helps to give us our protein.  Then he’ll go on some spiel about how it isn’t right to be squeamish about cooking food, especially since you’re not staring at it eye to eye.  “Come on Cassidy, it’s not like it’s looking at you; it’s just a piece of meat.”  And there we have it people; I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing about me being able to predict this.  Honestly I don’t know why I even bothered putting the effort in to this.  I knew it would backfire, and he wouldn’t even care that I tried.  I think I see where this whole relationship is going.

         “We need to talk.”

         “The best way to get over your aversion to raw meat is to confront it head on.  Grab the bull by the horns so to speak.”  He still isn’t listening to me; this is the way it always goes.  It takes two weeks for him to notice anything I tell him.  There was this one time I tried to tell him that the power went out while he was gone over the weekend, and that the meat in the chest freezer was probably bad.  So after multiple time of trying to tell him, I decided to try to throw away all the food by myself.  It was the night before trash day and when he came home early he started a giant argument about why I was throwing all our food away without even listening to why I was doing it.  By the time I explained that the food was bad he just looked at me and told me I must have been mistaken about trying to tell him about the food being spoiled.  I cleared my voice and spoke up a little louder.

         “We need to talk, Tyler.”

         “About what, the meat?  If it’s that big of a deal then I can just fix the steak by myself.  There’s no point in you making everyone miserable because you can’t stand a little bit of blood.”  He is so full of himself, I have told him over twenty times why I don’t like messing with raw meats, and he thinks it’s just some petty grievance.  I was hospitalized for a week and a half for extreme food poisoning at someone’s backyard barbeque.  They told me that my steak was a little rare, and it turned out they didn’t know how to cook at all.  Everyone else wasn’t complaining about their food, so I thought that it was just me being finicky about my meat.  It turned out that mine was the only one that he undercooked. 

         “Will you shut up and listen for once.  You have no idea how much being around raw steak makes me feel nauseous and I still tried to help you because I care about you.  But you’re too preoccupied about yourself to realize that I was putting extra effort into our relationship to try and fix it.    But I’m done, you don’t listen to me, you don’t try to understand why I’m always upset, and you honestly don’t care about me.  So you can do the steak by yourself and since we’re at it, you can keep the stupid apartment too.  I’ll be out by tomorrow.”  After screaming this, I realized that it felt as though a weight was lifted off of my shoulders.  Tyler always bulldozed over me and my opinions whenever they differed from him.  But there was no way he could get on top of this one. 

I turned around and walked out of the back yard.  As I shut the gate to the fence I looked back into the yard.  His parents had good taste.  Everything was clean and orderly.  Even the water lilies around the koi pond neatly poked out of the water in an orderly manner.  But that wasn’t what caught my attention.  It was the look on my now ex’s face.  Tyler looked back at me with a gaze that could be compared to a deer in the headlights.  And it felt so good to be the semi.