FFOct24 - Flash Fiction 7

Girl Meets Mess

There was this man, and that’s always how the trouble starts. There was this man, and I fell from the edge of space to the bad part of my mind where everything always gets so complicated. There was this man, and I didn’t love him.

Well, not exactly.

Love gives you strength. Love is your rock. Love stands by you when you break down at the grocery store and say that the soup aisle reminds you of everything your mother always said was wrong with you. This was not that.

It started innocently enough. He rear-ended my friend. On his motorcycle. Never seen anyone fly over the hood like that, but he got right back up.

“Fuck,” was the first word I ever heard him utter. “What the hell were you doing?”

Standing still at a red light was the answer to that question. It was mostly the head trauma.

My friend, who is good at this type of thing, calmly informed him that he was as bright as a baboon’s rear end and also offered to drive him to the hospital and asked would he please give us his insurance information. He declined, paying us out of pocket with a mysterious wad of twenties, and then speeding off. I would later run into him at the grocery store and then my anarchist book club. God, what’s a girl to do?

Soon it became obvious to me that he was a little unstable. At my anarchist book club (really we just read dystopian sci-fi that you’d find in any top 100 reading list for the American middle schooler) he got into ridiculous fights. He said that JFK was killed by Russian terrorists. He said that Diet Pepsi caused more cancer than cigarettes and that the FDA was a load of horseshit. He also said that car owners were the worst plague to every blight mankind.

Naturally, I was taken with him. That is until later. We started to go out together, my anarchist book club, and he got into three fist fights in less than a week. One was over a stolen parking spot and the second came at the end of a shouting match during a contentious dart game.

The last was with one of our fellow book club members over whether or not the idea of God could be proven true with empirical data. Telling you which side of the argument he was on will not give you a better idea of anything.

I started sneaking peeks at him. Then I started researching him on the internet. Then I started slowly inserting myself in his life, and it was all well and good until he started to notice my interest.

It turns out that the only thing worse than being spurned by an impossible crush is being intrigued by one. He started to ask me out to movies, shows, and bars. I cleverly dodged, but it was hard to keep it up for long.

Then, one night, I was describing the hardships of my ill-gotten amore to the same friend who was present at the time of the rear ending. She was smoking a joint at the time, but still gave me the single greatest insight I’d ever received.

“Do you think it’s possible that the reason you like him is because you don’t think you deserve any better?”

All that time I thought I was torturing myself for fun, but sometimes stabbing yourself in the thigh is just a way of avoiding the fact that your jeans no longer fit you properly.

There was this man, and that’s always how the trouble starts. Then there was this woman, and, for once, that was me. It was only when I realized how awful I was being to myself that I could finally stop staring at his thighs when we discussed 1984. Which was good, because his musings on A Brave New World were pedestrian at best.