Failed Experiment, Part 1

[ED. NOTE: OK, so I write some fiction, and I have this superstition about no one seeing my work before at least the first draft is completed. That said, here is something I've written, something that's been ossifying on my hard drive for a few months now. Please let me know what you think.]

I guess you could call them happy endings. What she and I have been doing, to cope with the end we know is coming, is making up futures with one another. We find that we can still look at each other when we delude ourselves into believing, that beyond our unavoidable separation, we will both find ourselves someplace warm, slightly humid, wearing not much clothing, in love with other people and feeling genuinely good about how things have turned out.

Like for example: I lay in bed with her, in the dark wide awake, and I tell her how happy her husband, who will be a medical doctor, who will have a general practice in Kathmandu, will make her when she finally risks it all and moves with him there. At first she will be confused by this obscure twist to her life, but it will re-invigorate her faith in things, and she will come to realize this one day as she is walking arid Nepalese streets by herself, listening to people have conversations in alien languages, feeling millions of miles away from me and this moment we are sharing right now. She will have finally moved beyond her past, and she will know it. She will be scared, sure, and she will feel she is at the end of the world, but she will have fundamental comfort knowing that he, this doctor, is close by, helping people, being heroic, loving her. There will be no question that she made the right choice.

Not only that, but her doctor ever be handsome! He will be adventurous and hulking, and will have a lot of body hair. She will pinch his body hair, twirl it around her index finger, and though he will hate it, he will laugh when she does it, embrace her harder. When they meet he will have a beard, but he will shave it once she tells him just how it annoys her.

They will not have children, and though he will prod about it, he will understand that it is simply not something she wants, at least at that precise moment. He will be patient, masculine in all the right ways.

She tells me that I will meet a girl soon after she and I break up. This girl will be reading poetry, laying on her stomach in a field somewhere, in some city, probably in the Midwest. I will have moved there, thinking that physically removing myself from my current location will help put some distance my failed relationship, the petty thing I had become.

Knowing no one in this new city, I will have a fit in my new apartment; I will find it necessary to redefine myself by meeting new people. I will go to the local college, or more specifically to this field nearby, where this girl will be reading. I will think to myself, as I spot this girl on the other end of the field, as I grind my bare feet into the hot grass, about how the day is one of those surprisingly hot days in mid May that remind you of the truth of what summer is, and forces you to embrace all that is coming.

I will meet her. I will meet her by going up, and in a move completely uncharacteristic of me, ask her what she is reading. I will see right away, by the way she tells me, "I am reading Rilke," that she, this girl, is simultaneously focused on success and bent on failure, is entrapped by the life she has chosen and yet somehow, strangely, able to transcend it. I will know at that moment that she will not be right for me, but she will be slight, will be wearing a sun dress, from which she will dust away dead grass and yellow pollen when she sits up, and I will be captivated by everything she does.

I will watch her and think to myself, "she has been alienated by the very person she has become," and be able to identify with it so much that I will fall in love, instantly and in spite of everything.

I will listen to everything she says, and she will be a graduate student, working as a teaching assistant during the summer. She will speak of her frustrations, of how she loves her job, but it isn't what she wants to do with her life. She will want to teach college, where the students call her by her first name but still respect her. She will act hopeful, optimistic. Not only that, but she will be disciplined about attaining exactly what she wants. This will be a problem. She will be focused on her career, when I really need someone to pay attention to me full time.

I will know this, but I will pursue being with her anyway.

I tell my current girlfriend, who is laying next to me, "That's an awful future you've made for me," and I am honestly hurt. "At least I tried to make yours happy."

"Oh, don't worry. Eventually you'll go to grad school, become a TA just like her, and will have an affair with one of the undergraduate students. You will get her pregnant; the administration will find out, it will be a huge scandal. They will threaten to sue you, but you will insist that you don't even have enough money to pay anything whatsoever."

"You know this is just getting worse?"

"Oh then of course, the beautiful idealist poet in the sundress, with whom you will be living, to whom you were thinking about getting married before the whole sordid mess began? She will leave you, without even saying goodbye. She will hear the story from an associate, someone who has always hated you, who will take delight in relaying the information. Then she will pack her things in the middle of the day and just leave. No note or anything. You'll know that she's gone as soon as you come in the door."

"..."

"But don't worry: that undergraduate, the one you will impregnate, she will be right for you. You will live in Toronto with her, have more children. She will go to school, you'll deliver mail, or maybe become an antique dealer."

"..."

"Oh, quit sulking. It's not like being stuck in Nepal with a Neanderthal doctor is pleasant."

"It's adventure."

"I don't want that."

"Why?"

"Because."

"So alright then, what is it that you want?"

"Not sure."

"You must have an idea."

"Not really."

"I don't believe you."

"Fine. Don't."