Our House
God, I love this place.
Sure, I know it’s a rat trap.
But it’s all mine.
When you grow up in a family with six kids you get to appreciate things like privacy and space.
When I first saw it, I mistook it for heaven.
It was just enough of a niche for me to feel comfortable.
Of course, half the reason I needed this was for Jane.
It’s hard to keep up a romance with both of us still living with our parents.
Someone always asks where you’re going and where you’ve been.
In my house, some squirt of a little sister would stick her head into my bedroom exactly at the wrong time on the excuse of borrowing tooth paste or a Beatles album.
Once one even came in just as I got Jane’s bra unsnapped.
Jane loves the place, too, enough to make her move in even though our relationship is already fraying.
I guess I’m late in making the move.
She wanted us to get a place of our own a year ago. But I got scared.
Something was going on inside of her and me that I didn’t trust.
When we met she was still young enough not to know what she wanted.
And she let herself get swept up by my dreams.
She saw herself as my buddy, but eventually and predictably got bored.
She loves me just enough to put up a good front and continue the romance.
But I think she loves the apartment so much she is willing to put up with me in order to live in it.
I never met a girl who loved sagging floors and pealing paint the way she does.
Yet even here, she gets bored.
And I can’t help but feel something fundamental is changing in her.
She keeps calling me “Daddy” by mistake.
Then denies saying it.
We bicker all the time.
Sometimes, the place feels as crowded as my parents’ house was with all those kids.
I can’t turn a corner without running into some unresolved issue with Jane, causing us to bicker again.
The fights come so often and are so bitter; Jane has decided to move out again.
Secretly I’m glad, thinking that the place will return to the uncomplicated place I saw when we first moved in.
Yet I know Jane has ruined the place for me and that I will wake up each morning and wander this place all day long taking note of all the things Jane has touched.
I know the only way I’ll be able to erase her image will be if I get drunk.
And once drunk, I’ll never be able to resist calling her and begging her to come back.
And I know what she’ll say before she slams the phone down.
I just don’t want to hear it.