Meat Hook pt. 6

She starts the conversation, like she's winding up a handwatch, she's moving on with the time. My personal dislike for having these conversations during eating is evidenced by my constant food play. My tofu moves from one end of the plate to the other, back and forth, and she expresses her feelings to me. My face shows nothing, that old stoic trick of masculinity, while my innards feel like they are being slowly swept away. The tide comes in, her voice peaks up in tempo, my sesame tofu moves away from her. The tide goes out, she breaks for a moment to gather her throats and my rice begins to cover the small chunks of tofu. She looks at me, the wave comes in breaking against the shore, my appetite is spoiled, my fork is placed on my plate.

"Truthfully, I don't know what to say." I tell her.

"Well, tell me how you feel." She says.

"I feel, I feel, like, uh, what I once was a fine oil painting was really just a drawing in the sandy beach, now being swept away by the coming tide. You are that tide, and you are in the picture. You are both, I am the drawing, a figure in the drawing, and the indentation in the sand, I'm the sand. Is there any possible way I can have a feeling right now? Its like asking the sand to hold itself together, to be composed, to show itself. But really its just sand, loose, pliable. It has no motion of its own, it is moved." My head turns as I finish the last bit of my metaphor, my facing blushing in embarassment from my art school imagery. Fuck I should have just recited some Rainer Maria Rilke to her and be done with it.

"Can't you see though, that I have different desires? You seem to want nothing. You are drenched in passivity, not me. You contemplate the world but then," at this point she begins to wave her hand, a gesture that annoys me for its attempts to make my philosophical meditations visceral. "Its all so smokey, fog like, you never seem solid. You never stir from your solitude. I can't be with that, I can't, I don't want that work, of always trying to draw you out. I'm your lover not a piece of twine that if you follow it will show you the way out of your convuluted maze of a mind."

"Well then I guess this is it..." I stammer.

She nods sullenly. I take out my wallet and put down enough money to cover our bill and the tip then walk out onto the street. I pass by the window and see her still seated, which makes me happy. She didn't get up and leave right away, spoiling the moment of emotion we just had. The funny thing is that I'm not quite sure what the conversation was about. In an immediate way I know that we just broke up, again, and perhaps for the final time but over what, and why? The whole affair has a fog like character to it, was I not listening to the conversation, was I ignoring what she was saying?

Walking north towards the entrance to the campus I pass by a convience store. I walk in and use my fake id to buy a twelve pack of pabst blue ribbon. In a little while I will sit in my room, and drink until I pass out.

The end.