Thursday, February 16, 2012

The Terrible Half-Ass Part before the Ultimate End...if you'd like to call it that

            Looking over that last post a second time, I remember last night when I was lying in bed about to go to sleep and suddenly thought about that night. I remember looking up at him at one point, wondering how I ended up in his arms, amazed at the idea that something like this came so easily. He looked back at me, “What?” And then I kissed him, deeply, because I didn’t think words would be appropriate to get the point across to him. “Oh, that.” He smiled…
            I guess the real highlight of that night for me was the fact that I wanted him so bad, but he said that he had too much respect for me to ever let things happened that way. Just thinking that he actually said he respected me…
            I’m not going to drag this on too much farther, so I’ll tell you all about the night I got drunk while babysitting. It really isn’t as bad as it sounds. I was babysitting with my friend at a neighbor’s house. When they came home, after the children had been put down for the night, they brought back Four Lokos. Not only that, but there mother, Mindy, wanted me to taste some vanilla vodka she had hidden in the fridge. Ruben was at a poetry competition out of state during this time.
            After a few drinks, when I couldn’t find him online, I saw his friend and fellow poet (one of the founders of their poetry group, and very out-spoken, feminist poet), Jess online. Now, with the drinking I had been doing, I was also beginning to feel rather guilty for what was going on between Ruben and myself. I clicked on Facebook chat. Now, once again, because Facebook didn’t save those at the time, I, once again, cannot necessarily describe exactly what went on during this conversation, so a brief description will have to do. At first, I asked who all she was with and, as it turned out, she was with all of the poets who had gone to competition that summer. I basically told her that I had done something terrible and that she was going to hate me forever and I felt so guilty. She asked what was wrong, and told me that she and all the poets still had tons of love for me, and I told her that I was having an inappropriate relationship with an older guy. I’m pretty sure it was obvious enough that I had been drinking.
            Jess told me to quit tip-toeing around the subject because she didn’t like games. Eventually though, the conversation turned gears round and round until she decided that she had to go to bed. I said okay and that I was sorry for irritating the hell out of her. Just as she got offline, Ruben came online. I knew that I was obviously in for it.
            He was forgiving enough, probably because he had been drinking at the time as well. I told him how sorry I was for talking to Jess and that I needed to get together with him at some point to talk to him about what was going on between us.
            Long story short, mostly because I was drunk, I basically told him that I was starting to fall in love with him. He said that there was no way it could ever work out for us, fed me a bunch of bullshit about waiting until I was 17, the Texas state age of consent when we could be around each other without worrying about what people thought. I almost laughed at this. People who had seen me with him had usually thought he was my dad…
            I’m not going to go too far into detail of what all happened, but in the end, I told him that he was a really difficult person not to love. He told me that I was too.
            I guess the whole reason I had begun feeling like that after drinking a bit was just the fact that he had said many times the last night we were together that he really liked me. At the moment, I had felt as if he were trying to hold back from admitting he loved me, but alas, I was probably wrong. I was wrong about a lot of things. But that night, he decided to be perfectly honest with me – so he told me that he had lied to me previously about his age, which I had originally thought was 30. It was, in fact, actually 35; a year older than my stepfather.
            He laughed when I told him this, explained that it didn’t matter to him as long as I wasn’t bothered by it, and we left it at that. I tried not to dwell on this somewhat disgusting fact; I was young and carefree as one would call it. And I believed that true love knew no boundaries, none whatsoever. I never wanted Ruben to think I was uncomfortable with anything that went on between the two of us because I thought it seemed immature for some reason. Being uncomfortable with Ruben’s age was like telling him that I didn’t want to see him anymore, and I was completely intent on keeping Ruben around as long as I possibly could.
            Many could say that I wanted him because he was a writer, or because he worked for a comic book publishing company, and had published a bit of his own work, because he defeated the odds so to speak. But it wasn’t that, not at all. He was a poet, he was the type of person I had always imagined myself ending up with.
            I wouldn’t see him again until September 7th for the very last time.

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