TBT #26: An ending
So we went and we sat in cramped seats and shared about four gallons of stale popcorn. I had to pee for the last forty minutes. She shifted uncomfortably until I put my arm around her. She sighed softly, happy. My arm fell asleep. The stupid kids in front of us kept playing with their cellphones, giggling, driving me insane. The film ended with orchestral flourish, and a slow fade to black. The lights came on as the credits rolled. We stood up quietly and struggled with our coats. Our eyes met and she smiled that silly smile that caught me all those years ago.
As we stepped out of the theatre into the cold parking lot, she grasped my arm quickly. I smiled, searched my pocket for the car keys, looked at her again. She was humming a little tune, skipping softly, tilting her head to the sky to watch the snow fall. God, she was so fucking annoying.
“So what do you think?” she asked, as we passed by row after row of cars in search of our own.
“Hmm?” I questioned.
“About the movie, silly!” she laughed, gripping my arm a little tighter.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I responded. “What did YOU think?”
She scrunched her nose a bit. “I didn’t really like it,” she said. “Mary was like, ‘it’s so great!’ And all the people at work were just SO into it. But I didn’t really see what was so good about it.”
I saw a car that looked like mine, and quickly pressed the unlock button on my keychain. It didn’t work. It wasn’t my car.
“It’s just, like, you know,” she continued, “what was the point of that movie?”
She laughed at herself, for no reason. “I was like, where was the POINT?” she continued.
Another car. Didn’t work. Couldn’t remember where I parked.
“The point,” I said slowly, and then again. “The point.”
“The point!” she agreed cheerfully.
“I hate people who say things like that.”
She was taken aback. She withdrew from my arm for a second.
I went on. “It drives me fucking insane. The point. The point! ‘What was the point of that movie?’ God dammit, do you know how aggravating that is to hear? It makes me angry on so many fucking levels! First of all, I just want to yell, you know, what the fuck is the point of YOU? Jesus Christ, if every fucking thing has to have some sort of magical point then where the hell is yours? You spend half your life worrying what other people think about you and the other half trying not to LOOK like you worry what other people think about you. And yet here you are complaining about the lack of a POINT.
“The point! The point! Jesus Christ, the point. The second thing is that every fucking thing has some sort of point. There is a reason behind everything even if you’re too goddamned moronic to see it. How you can sit there and watch some movie about — I don’t know — STREET RACING for an hour and a half and say ‘That was great!’ and yet see something like that and come out bitching about the lack of a point, I’ll never know. You know, there are some things in life where the point isn’t just right fucking there in front of your face. Sometimes you need to think about things, and see things, and examine things and even FIND things because not everything is just right fucking there on the surface. Are you capable of understanding that? Have you ever even CONSIDERED that?
“Where the fuck is MY CAR?” I yelled, kicking the ground in frustration. She had stopped walking, and was a few steps behind me. I whirled and looked at her puzzled face, her creased forehead, her sad eyes. It was snowing really hard now.
“It’s not that I think you’re stupid because I don’t. I DON’T think you’re stupid. I think you could be a wonderfully, beautifully, gorgeously whole person. But you’re not. You’re only interested in the next weekend of your life and even then, you’re not so much concerned with having a good time but rather doing something some other assholes will think is ‘cool’. I can’t stand this preoccupation you have with THAT, more than anything else. We are twenty-six years old, for Christsakes! Do you know what the REALLY cool people our age are doing on a Friday night? They’re renting a fucking movie, staying home and having Fondu or something. They have real jobs, maybe kids, families! That’s what they’re doing. They’re not going to some fucking dance bar filled with drunken 19-year-olds dancing to annoying pop songs. They’re not smoking seventeen cigarettes and hitting on some jerk with a nose ring when I’m in the bathroom. They’re not throwing up in the goddamned potted plants outside my apartment at 5 a.m. My mother gave me those fucking plants!
“It’s been almost a year and the sadddest thing about this whole relationship is that I feel like I know EVERYTHING about you. Do you know how terrible that is? That you’re so easy to figure out that I did it in less than a year? Even now, as I’m watching you do your silly little crying-girl expression I KNOW what you’re going to say when I stop speaking. I know all the arguments you’ll make. You’ll play the victim and maybe you’re entitled to that much. Maybe I shouldn’t be yelling at you in a movie theatre parking lot but goddammit, I mean, the POINT? THE POINT? Who even says that! And then you’ll make like it’s unfair for me to say this stuff to you when you could say the same sorts of things to me. And you’re right about that, too. You could tell me a lot of bad things about myself, but I don’t… I don’t think they’d hurt because, really, they’d all be things I told YOU I hated about myself. So go ahead: call me pretentious, call me self-destructive, call me aloof, emotionally manipulative and insecure. Call me a fucking contradiction — a pessimistic idealist who believes in the very best of things but doesn’t think HE’LL ever get to see them.”
We were walking again. She kept her head down, as she stepped softly beside me. She tried to speak, every so often, but I just kept going.
“I know all of that! The difference between what you want to say and what I’m saying is that what I’m saying surprises you, because no one has ever called you on your bullshit before.”
A gust of wind, car headlights painting giant shadows puppets of us on the wall, still lost in a sea of whirling snow, unable to find my car.
“W-wait…” she started.
“Not yet,” I told her. “You don’t talk yet. The last thing you want to say is that if I feel all these things then why the hell am I still with you. Why am I with you at all? How could I ever say ‘I love you’ to you, who I’m saying all this about? But it’s simple. It’s not complicated. First of all, you’re gorgeous. And maybe it’s shallow to say but your fucking smile and the way you play with your hair and those pink and purple shirts you wear — they all just drive me crazy. But I think more importantly than that is that you have all the trappings of a GREAT person. Somewhere beyond all these hang-ups and fucking bizarre ideas about life there is a person I would love to be with. Someone funny, caring, smart and, god, I don’t know. But I can’t… you won’t bring it out. And I can’t keep thinking that you WILL someday, all of the sudden, because we’re getting really old, you know? We have to be adults now. We have to stop HOPING to be a certain kind of person and just BE that kind of person and, you, well, I guess… this is you. This is all you are and all you’re going to be for the time being. And I’ve accepted that; I really have. This is me accepting that.”
More. I couldn’t stop. I had to finish. “The only time you ever really needed me — the only time you ever really showed me something I’d call love — is when you were miserable. When you’re sad, you desperately want to be with, want to walk with me, want me to hug you and hold you and tell you how much I love your eyes. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not a relationship, you know? It’s not love.”
I stopped. She didn’t say anything. I pressed the button on my keyring again, hoping to hear the sounds of my car door unlocking. As if by fate, there was a soft beep, and we walked silently, side by side, through the swirling snow, to my car.
She was still quiet as I pulled out of the parking lot. The road was pretty empty. It was late at night. The man on the radio screamed that the night was young, and that the party was just getting started. My windshield wipers made a squeaking sound as they pushed away the snow. She rested her head against her hands, not letting me see her tears. I drove even faster.
“That movie,” I said, breaking the silence. “I really liked it. I mean, it wasn’t the best I’ve ever seen or anything. But it was cute.”
Snow on the windshield was pushed away. Again and again under the orange highway lights.
“I’d see it again,” I concluded.
Tags:fiction relationships sad short fiction the best things- Posted by Matt at 04:53 am
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“You donât talk yet.” ?!!!? It sounds like someone totally derailing and that’s fine, but this line… Uncool, Matt. You can take a girl down without being a prick.
No he can’t.
I really can’t! And, also, the question I wanted to ask with this story is “Is this guy a jerk?” Because when writing it, I sorta thought that he WAS. But I’m interested in other interpretations.
I’m interested in why you SORTA thought he was a jerk, because he DEFINITELY is. I don’t really see any room for any other sort of interpretation; he’s condescending, he’s disrespectful, and very self-centered in this particular passage. It’s OK to criticize someone — everyone has their right to express themselves (interesting how HE won’t even hear HER out). And, if he really HAS identified faults in the girl in the story, a DECENT person would at least extend her an olive branch at the end, you know? I mean, she can’t see her own problems, but the guy CAN. He should help her if he really thinks she’s worth it.
But he doesn’t, you see. He JUST tells her she’s bad. And he does it in a way that just cuts her down. He totally has no interest in helping her. To me, that says he really has no interest in HER. Even if he said those things about why he’s still with her, that doesn’t make a difference, because that’s not all there is to her — she’s the good AND the bad. And if the guy doesn’t want to embrace all of her, he’s just wasting his time, and hurting this girl.
Not a cool guy at all. This is the sort of person I hope never to have in my life, and you can be sure that no person like this would get very far with me without me calling them on THEIR bullshit.
I’m kind of thinking this guy would be more of a jerk if this stuff was going on in his head and he didn’t say it. I think I’d rather be pissed off than placated. And really, he seems to be yelling at himself as much as at the girl.
I think the guy couldn’t be more of a jerk, just because he didn’t end it right then and there. There are better ways to get to the same end theyr’e at right now, I think.
On a tangent now: I know the girl is pretty spineless, but I’m thinking it would be interesting to see how someone would write her response to all of that. Just by going off this article, it’s plain to see that this girl has very little in the way of self-confidence, and her conception of self-worth is non-existent, but with the guy not being very conducive to actually progressing in the situation, it almost feels like it’s her turn to speak.
With that said, what would you have her response be? This is an open question, to anyone who wants to field it.
The guy could totally be more of a jerk, I think. He could say nothing.
The genesis behind this story was essentially that I really wanted to write a rant. I think, however, it came out as more than that, in that both the guy and the girl in the story are really interesting characters. As the writer, I wonder how exactly you got the idea that the girl is spineless? She does, after all, only have three or four lines in the whole thing, and I never really intended her to be a spineless character.
But then, I never intended for the guy to be a jerk, either, and that seems to be the case. I’m not sure, though. AS much as his outburst is inappropriate and mean-spirited, I still sort of like him because, in the end, it’s just this raw all-out burst of honesty. I think we all have moments where we just come to realize that what we’ve doing for years is stupid, wrong and hurtful, whether it’s “I hate my job” or “I hate my apartment” or “I hate my girlfriend.” Moments where we come to see that we just have to get out NOW.
He’s totally long-winded and a bit pretentious, though. It’s similar to Blockbuster Girl, sort of.
I don’t see that saying nothing would the guy MORE of a jerk, for the reason that saying nothing and doing what he did will come to the same end, which is that there is no resolution or even an attempt being made at resolution.
Saying something didn’t make him the jerk. It was the self=centeredness of his words that made him a jerk. He made no follow-up effort at all. At that moment, it was all about him and his outburst. Breaking down happens, sure, everyone’s entitled to it. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that NOT saying anything would have been BETTER. I’m actually saying that saying NOTHING is just as bad as what this guy did. Does that make sense?
I hope you can see that the vocalization of the issues he’s got doesn’t necessarily make things better. It led to the point where the next step was to work on things, whether by working together or just getting out of it all together, like you said, but neither of them make a move towards either of those ends. And that’s where the thought that this girl is spineless comes in. She doesn’t make a move — she doesn’t even snap back at the guy (which, in itself, isn’t really the most intelligent thing to do, either, but whatever).
I know you didn’t plan on her being spineless, but how can I call someone who doesn’t even talk BACK a person with backbone? I mean, forget even just defending herself, because, who knows, she might not even have much of a case to defend herself with, but a person with self-worth would have said something. That’s why I said she was spineless. There’s just not enough coming from her to be able to make a judgement to the contrary.
If you didn’t intend for your girl to be spineless, maybe you should write her a rebuttal. I have some ideas as to how she can chime in with a response, but I’d like to hear what you’d do with her in that situation. If you’re content to leave her the way she was at the end of the story, where she was just crying to herself in the car with that guy, then she really is a spineless character.
I think the thing that makes me not completely hate the guy character in this particular piece is that he DOES recognize a problem. He’s not deluding himself, that’s for sure. He’s honest to himself, and that’s what you guys have also picked up on. But I react so violently to his actions for the reason that, OK, he’s got the ability to see that things are going wrong, but what does he do about it? Nothing, essentially. It doesn’t matter that he told her off because, as I said earlier, that doesn’t fix things. You gotta DO something if you want to fix things. It is not enough just to vent.
I ramble when I’m bored — did you notice that?
When I first read this, my reaction was “Wow, this is an exceptionally good piece of work.” And the amount of discussion it has generated has validated that opinion for me.
I don’t really feel like weighing in on the “The guy could/couldn’t be more of a jerk” discussion but for some reason I am. And here’s what I’ve found. Yeah, the guy’s quite the jerk and he was way harsher than he needed to be. But at the same time, it’s good that he said something. Saying something is doing something. Their relationship has changed and there will be something changing over the next while.
Just because the situation hasn’t changed by the end of the story, doesn’t mean that it won’t eventually. That world goes on long after we stop tuning into it and everything’s always changing. His harsh words can’t not change things eventually.
So, so far, the guys think he’s a jerk but not a TOTAL jerk and the girls kind of think he’s a total jerk. I’m not sure if that’s telling, as our sample size is CRAP, but, still, there’s probably something there. Anyone else who would like to weigh in on this pressing, potentitally explosive issue?
As I was writing it, I assumed that the relationship WAS over after this conversation. She can’t just go storming off or anything, though, because, seriously, it’s a parking lot and it’s cold and she has to get home somehow. I don’t think she’d ever want to stay around after an outburst like that, but at the same time I think she was a bit too stunned (and hurt) to really mount much of a defensive.
Writing the story from the girl’s perspective is a really interesting idea but I’m not sure that I’m capable of writing female characters that are anything more than mysterious targets of longing affection or nameless voids that male characters simply play off of. I’ve only ever known a few women REALLY well, so I’m not sure how confident I feel trying to get inside the head of a female character. I don’t know if it’ll come off as believable.
Maybe, though.
write it from the car’s perspective!
like the love bug.
I was thinking of rewriting the ending and having the girl just nail him in the face with a spinning roundhouse kick, then she could steal his car, run him over, and go non-stop to Mexico, and freedom.
drama.
What is THE POINT in him letting her know that?
It sounds an awful lot like he’s making A POINT.
I liked it.