Chapter 262

I woke up at 10:30, holy hell, I must have been in serious need of restorative sleep. I might have even slept longer if the girlfriend and the dog didn’t come to poke me awake, leaving me just enough time to take a shit and shower and get dressed to go play poker at her friend’s place.

I took the wheel, and plugged my mp3 player with the aux cord. It’s been malfunctioning recently, the sound it produces is all tinny and hollow, and you have to twist it in the outlet to even get a signal. I ragequit, yanked the shit-fucking aux cord out, snapped it in two and threw it on the floor. The girlfriend also snapped, and started yelling at me. As I drove out of the underground parking, I just whispered “Shhhhh... why are you shouting? I’ll pick up the pieces later” but she just kept howling over that most trivial of things. I rewatched a few classic Breaking Bad episodes recently, and Mary's and Skylark's script seems to exclusively consist of “Nag! Nagnagnag! Nag! Nag! NAG! NAG!” No wonder Hank and Walt found solace and comfort in a world of gun-toting Mexican psychopaths and strung-out druggos who'd stab you without warning for a fix. A few blocks later, she apologized, and said she shouldn’t overreact like that. Our relationship has been mostly if not near-totally harmonious through the years, because of open communication and admitting when we’re wrong. I also apologized for chimping out at that stupid piece of audio equipment.

We got to her friend’s place, ate a meal of Burger King and stir-fried goodies over rice, and played poker all afternoon. We brought them some of the pomegranates that the school gave me, and another guest brought mangoes. After the poker games, they were all bunched up in the solarium, talking about whatever Chinese people talk about, and I ate a mango over the sink.

“What are you doing?! Those mangoes are supposed to be a gift for my parents!”, the host said, pointing at the big ornate gift box. Everybody laughed, and I proposed to replace the lost mango with one of the pomegranates we brought. Ni vu, ni connu.

They live in the south part of town, so we thought we might as well swing by Metro and stock up on some of the imported groceries we need. I bought six cartons of grapefruit juice, now that I quit beer I need something tasty to quench my thirst when water doesn’t do it. When it was time to pay, I extended my undefeated streak at picking the slowest lane, and the cashier was particularly useless, constantly botching the payment operation of the man in front of me, who had a cart loaded with Hennessy bottles and nothing else. Maybe he’s the assistant to the producer of a hip-hop video.

Back home, we put the groceries in their place. The girlfriend saw the chunk of beef I put in the fridge yesterday, and started screeching at me, saying I should have put it in the freezer, or else it will go bad like the steak I forgot in the fridge for four days last week. “There’s no more room in the freezer! I’ll cook it tonight” “BUT IT WILL GO BAD!!! RAAAAH!!!” I opened the freezer and showed the drawers, filled to the brim with the meat her mother sent us. “The. Freezer. Is. Full. I’ll cook it tonight.” She threw the meat chunk at me, grabbed her keys, and stormed out.

Nonplussed, I grabbed my bag and headed to the gym like I was planning to anyway. I detoured by the car park, and saw she had driven off. She’s that mad, uh? I sent a message asking where she is, and twenty minutes later, between two sets on the bench press, she replied by saying we should break up. Fucken hell. I tried to call her, no reply. “Come back home, we’ll discuss”

I wondered if I should interrupt my workout but decided to go through with it, even though I now had a boulder of shit on my mind. I rode back home, and she was curled up in bed, crying. We had a long talk, it feels a bit weird to write all of it down on a public platform like this, even though nobody reads it except my dad, but it’s also quite cathartic. She was telling me how she’s scared I will stop loving her if she keeps throwing tantrums like that, and how it will be hard to reconcile the fact that we both want to go live close to our families, who are on two opposite ends of the world. She was speaking to me in Chinese, as we do most of the time, and she would be sobbing so hard that the second half of her sentences would just trail off. It’s true that I’ve been feeling a bit homesick, which is rare for me, I like China and I like my job and I’m used to be away but my niece just turned two, and seeing the pictures shared by my family made me a bit sad she’s growing up not knowing me, I’ve only seen her once, when she was six months old. Among other little pangs of doubt that always pop up in the minds of long-term expatriates, wondering if it’s time to go home.

As I was sitting there trying to get the girlfriend to come back to Earth, I was astonished at how I couldn’t truly feel sad. I was mostly looking at the situation with my pragmatic detachment, weighing the pros and cons of having her in my life, wondering who would keep the dog (who, bless his little soul, was just there with us on the bed, jumping around, wagging his tail and being oblivious of what was happening), what I’d do after she’s gone, and other practical things. If that is what’s meant to be, so be it. Then, she changed her tune, begging me not to leave her, saying she’ll move to Quebec with me, we’ll make it work. I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t love her, I do, I really do, and I value immensely the love she has for me and how we’ve been together for almost five years now. I want her to stay.

We took the dog out for a walk, and kept talking. I said I still love her, but now, for the first time, I’m foreseeing the possibility that maybe one day I won’t. Terrible, maybe, but I have to be honest, if she can blow a fuse like that over a pound of meat, what could happen if we’re subjected to a much more important source of stress? And if she’s willing to just drive off and give me the silent treatment like that, it’s a serious breach of trust. Blind love that lasts forever and never meets obstacles is only in romance novels and the minds of insane, overly attached people, and I had to get it off my chest if we want to move forward and look in the rear-view mirror at this bump in our relationship, like all relationships hit at some point. Hopefully we’ll come back stronger out of it, like the saying goes.

Back home, I ate the leftover chicken and put the beef in the slow cooker with onions, ginger, coconut milk and all sorts of spices to make a curry. I kissed the sleeping girlfriend’s forehead when I got to bed. Everything will be alright.

I started reading Michael Bisping’s autobiography. It’s pretty good so far. MMA fighters’ memoirs are literary candy to me.