The hot water is sobering enough to show that my previous eloquence in my letter to Katie was pure drunken imagination. What was written instead was a tangle of slurs, insults and badgering.
"Katie, I don't understand why you'd be so callous as to put a picture of you and that douchebag on your refrigerator. You know that I come over and that I'd be likely to see it. Why would you do that? I know that we've agreed to see other people, but we've also been dating consistently for a while. Why would you flaunt this new "love?" You're don't care about me? This new beau is so much better than me? Regardless you are an insensitive shitbag."
I'd written it on a small piece of white paper that night and this morning put it in the post. We don't live far from each other so I suspect she'll get my short note in a few days. In the mean time I have my anxieties to deal with.
Trying not to think of the situation I put on my black pants, the same ones from last night and pick out the least wrinkled white button down shirt in my closet. After slipping it on, my search for a suitable tie begins. Most of my ties have been handed down to me, from friends, or stolen from thrift stores. Finding a old navy blue tie and slipping it around my neck I grab my keys and head out the door. It only takes me fifteen minutes to get to work, today I walk, thus taking me a half an hour. The drive isn't that long but finding parking ends up taking ten minutes, plus the worry of having to feed the meter every hour or so. If the time on your meter runs up, you pay $50. There is no public parking in the downtown area, especially not for workers. Another way the working stiff is getting stiffed.
My eyes are a bit off from the sun and the lingering influences of last night's drinking. Despite my desire not to think of Katie and my feelings, they seem to come up again and again. The problem with jealousy is that it does no one any good. How is it helpful for me to be jealous? How does it help Katie, or anyone else? Katie is not necessarily to be blamed for my feelings, they are my feelings. Her actions certainly invoke feelings, but they are mine still. Yet jealousy seems to be as "natural" as any emotion I have, as natural as the joy I have when I'm around her, the contentedness, the slight moments of anger, or frustration. I could take the higher path and recognize that jealousy won't do much good and by behaving in a 'noble' manner. Perhaps to ignore my feelings, pretend things are okay, or have a long talk with Katie about the whole matter. Yet I cannot endure this wallpaper style, coating everything over; nor its vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings. This desire for helpfulness, a constant altruism, how weary.
What angers, no perplexes me even more is that our relationship isn't based on anything core, there is no natural right, or contract to which I can claim, other than a default of social habit. We'd been dating off and on for quite some time but our ability to create conditions for the relationship is virtually nonexistent. Thus there is no valid reason for blame. Still there seems to be the lingering social pressures. Laughingly my mind comes across to the image of my exchanging my wrestling coat, and my class ring to Katie in exchange for her devote, unwavering pledge to be going steady with me. Those rituals are arcane now, and increasingly I find my relationships, not just dating but all of them, to be ephemeral. We move around, our jobs are precarious, our emotional lives are dictated to a large extent by our ability to economically survive. There is no bastion of stability for us anymore, we work, we grow old, we die. As a young as I am I know that I'll never be able to support my parents as they grow old, and if they aren't able to retire, how can I believe that I won't be working until the day I die? Is my frustration over this affair of the heart about the instability of my relationship with Katie? Is it because of my own instability? The spectacle of love is one of undying commitment, of being there through think and thing and to never stray nor sin. Yet already that sacred image is coming crashing down, so quickly, and full of hubris.
Clocking in I look at my section. At the restaurant we are given ten table sections, some sections of course draw more business due to their location. Mine is mediocre, and although its nice out now the weather looks a little ominous, so business is likely to slow down even more. Molly the waitress who had my section before I arrived transfers a table over to me.
"They've sat down and I've given them menus, gave them their drinks and they should be ready to order soon. I gotta get out of this place." Molly says.
Molly has been working for at this place for about 6 months, she's waited other places, and despite her degree (an english major) is unable to find a job other than hustling the tables.
"The money isn't bad, but the repetition always seems to get me, and this place is managed horribly." She always tells me when we'd eat our staff meal together.
Work goes by painfully slow. There are few tables, especially as it begins to rain. The bartender starts to pour some drinks for the staff and I quickly get a buzz. I go into the men's room and take a few vicatin that I've been saving from my wisdom teeth extraction a month ago. My body has a slow numbness to it. The kitchen closes and I close all my checks. By eleven o'clock I'm walking to the nearby bar. Its a dive bar, with a clientele composed mainly of old working men. They haven't retired yet, but are obviously too tired to be working day by day. Taking a seat by a window I drink a pint of beer. Outside I can see that its begun to rain harder. My agitation at having to walk home in the rain begins to grate on me. I order a shot of jagermeister and another pint of IPA. Sullenly I look out the window. Across the street is a homebum covering himself with some newspaper as he scuttles to a store overhang where he lays down, the newspaper still covering his dirty body.
In this gloomy bar everyone seems bored to death, I take my empty glass and push it off the table, watching it shatter. I pick up my other pint glass and smash it against the wall. Nobody gets excited; disappointed I let myself be thrown out. Yet everyone there could have done exactly the same thing, if not today, tomorrow. If not because of the jealousy felt due to a nebulous relationship, nor due to the stress of the job then because of something else. Something else that is equally common, and painfully mediocre. I made the thought concrete, crossing out of interior isolation, the introverted separation between self and outside world. Nobody responds to a sign which I thought was explicit. I remain alone like the hooligan who burns down a church or kills a policeman, at one with myslef but condemned to exile as long as other people remain exiled from their own existence. I feel suspended in a zone of zero gravity. All the same, the indifference which greets me allows me to hear the sound of my own cry; even if this revelation tortures me, I know that I will have to start again, more loudly; with more coherence.
The end.
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