DTR

It's called DTR for Defining the Relationship. A DTR is a type of conversation. Couples have it when one of the two suddenly realizes the relationship isn't going as he or she had hoped and dreamed.

It's one of the sounds humans make just after the one last present moment where a certain future slips into the past. And it happens all the time.

A DTR is an attempt to salvage those hopes, those dreams. It usually doesn't work. Usually, your instinct is right. You feel like you're sunk? Your sunk. First guess, best guess, they say.

Some relationships consist entirely of DTRs. This is a story about one such relationship.

I don'tlike to use my friends' real names when I write about them, so we'll call the couple George and Sara, without the H she always said and I'll try to remember that.

Anyway, George met Sara in college. That's the only place anybody I know met anybody. They met because I was dating Sara and George was my roommate.

Sara and I weren't much of a couple. When I introduced her to George, he stayed at his computer while sara and I sat on the couch. From there, George cracked jokes on me and Sara laughed. My DTR with Sara went like this:

Me: "I'm not sure we like each other."

Sara: "No, I don't think we do."

Me: "Maybe you like my friend George?"

Sara: "Maybe."

It was like a DTR before their R. But even then, she couldn't say how she felt about George at the moment.

Still, they got together. George spent the last month of junior year in her dorm room.They held DTR conversations every single night for the 30 nights of May.

I said to George once, "What do you talk about?" because I couldn't imagine.

He said, "Us."

"Not like you and me, us, right?" I said, wary.

"Not like you and me."

"So like?"

"So like us. About the relationship," he said, "Where it's going."

"So where's it going?"

"We don't know yet. That's why we're talking about it."

"Do you at least make out after?"

"Shut up."

Then summer came and presumably they talked on the phone. But obviously not enough because come fall, George told me he still didn't know where the relationship stood.

"So you're still not sure if you like each other?" I asked.

"No, we are. I mean, we know we like each other."

"So you like each other. What's to talk about?"

"Well, it's hard to say. We're just not sure about some things."

"No kidding."

"Shut up."

Around me, they seemed normal. And they were around me a lot. George would be sitting on the couch watching TV and Sra would come in the room and crawl over the back of the couch and straddle him from behind. I told them it looked like Sara was giving birth to a gigantic and disgusting baby.

"Shut up," George said.

Eventually, I hung a curtain around the frame of my lofted bed. I hid there to escape. Sometimes they cooed. I shuddered.

So in the winter I was surprised to hear George wonder if the wonder if the would be together after the break.

"But?" I said.

"We're just not sure if we're in love. Or what's next."

"But you're in love?"

"Yes."

"With her?"

"Yes."

"You love her?"

"Yep."

"You've told her?"

"Yes. I've told her."

"Ah. So she's just never said the same?"

"No, she has."

"But?"

As time passed, I figured it out. It was after they married, years later.

"We can't figure it out," George told me.

"But you did," I said, "You just married."

"Well, we married, sure." He said, "Now we're trying to figure out if we want to stay that way."

"You just married," I said, "Like literally, like five minutes ago. I was your best man. You stood there. You said to her, you said, I do."

"I did," he said.

Costellations, here, where there are no stars

The city deepens into blue and gold. The blue is the sky that shades from a pale a carnation to a navy blue. The gold is the window, forty floors up, away from me and among many others in a jagged pattern. Their yellow gains substance as the sun sets.

And I hardly notice. Its all become so very familiar.

my mornings are spelled like morning

I can’t remember anything I’ve ever read—not a single sentence—but I know what to do in the mornings.

This morning, I said “I am determined to have a positive attitude.” And I sucked down an iced coffee to shake the codene haze. Maybe you use NyQuil to sleep.

My mornings are edgy, eh?

No, they’re not. They are special k with strawberries mornings. Crunchy, freeze-dried strawberries in organic one percent that tastes like two.

Doesn’t milk taste like cheese after you swallow it? I mean later. Before you brush your teeth. I have never seen an udder, by the way.

So I shake off the haze, the last tendril of the last dream. I can’t remember this morning’s except the phrase, “ending her reality. Ha!” and the echoing sound of my alarm clock.

Waking always feel like laughing-laughing into-into a canyon-a canyon.

No. No it doesn’t.

Then I shower to wet my hair so I can comb it to look right. Parted and flat. Don’t know why that’s right or who its right for. I wear cowboy boots under my jeans. That’s for me.

It’s because I like to clump. The sound, not the gathering.

Then I stream into my ant hole in this ant pile city.

Shrimp-shaped isn't shapeless

[listen to this post instead]

I was once taught that we are only what we want. That its only desire that motivates us to move and give shape to our time.

But lots of time is shapeless. And sometimes I feel myself wanting of want.

I walked home from my friends house today.

There's a window behind me right now as I write, so I know it’s still gray out there like it was when I just walked home. Still not quite not quite raining. And I sang on my way home. Let me try to think what I sang.

I know.

It started with leaving a message on Anna’s phone. Anna is my love. Her face fits well in the space near mine is why, mostly. I said to her, “Hello Love. It’s Nicholas. Give me a call when you can. Bye.”

I punctuated the message with periods when I spoke it. But then for the rest of the way home I repeated the message to myself, changing the punctuation.

Hello? Love? It’s Nicholas. Give me a call? When you can. Bye. Hello love! It’s Nicholas. Give me a call! When you can? Bye!

A silly game. Right?

That’s what this feels like, sometimes. Not just this this.

My grandmother died of who knows what. Apathy? She died at 78 after a life. When she died she was shrivled like a cooked shrimp. And underweight.

Before, she was once a tall, wide woman, with vibrant lipstick smeared on her lips and off them, too. She wore bright flower patterned blouses. Sometimes there were made of silk and they stuck to her back in the summer when she visited.

She would yell at her husband all the time.

Really. Yell! With an exclamation mark.

And he was stooped over his canes and very clutzy because he wore braces around his knees.

On his way to fight the Japanese he got sick and collapsed in his cabin. Polio. They met and married after that.

I think he decided early on to put up with her yelling because he felt she put up with his polio. We all have these sicknesses. I suppose.

Anyway, she died. And nobody cared. My dad said, “I’m just sad I never had a mother like yours.”

Welcome to Lunch

I work during the day. I goof at night. During lunch, I write; I read; I caffeinate.