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.