Just Another Long Distance RElationship

Originally written on September 13, 2009 at 3:10pm

It's the Phoenix, Arizona airport, and I'm sitting across from my gate watching a man watch me, watching him lumber up and down the hallway, his lip slightly jutted forward, the sleepy gait of someone under heavy drugs, a patient straight from the locked down psych-ward--the ever present effects of enough antipsychotics to drop a horse.

"So, it's serious then huh?" The Writer ex-boyfriend says. This is his noncommittal way of testing waters. He thinks he can lull me into a false sense of security.

We know each other too well. "I don't want to get into another long distance relationship," I put my head down, and look at the tips of my sneakers. "I didn't particularly enjoy it the first time." The crying, the fights because fighting was the only way to get a man's attention when he lives on the other side of the country.

His voice lowers. "I can understand that."

It's some time in April of 2003, and I'm standing at a pay phone inside an old, dying casino in Reno, NV. I remember the carpet being the color of dried blood, and the smell of cigarette smoke so heavy you could feel the tumors starting in grow in your lungs like the first kicks of a fetus.

I'm dazed, holding the phone. I hear my own voice, the voice somewhere in the back of my skull, rattling down a long hotel hallway to reach my lips. "I can't do this anymore."

"If you're going to do it, if you're going to say goodbye, then just do it," he dares me.

Without a word, I hung up the phone, knocking over an ass tray, which shatters on the floor.