hothouse flowers

This is a memory.

 

I’m dating a boy who might be a douchebag. He’s got a soft side to him that is kind to animals and grandmothers, of which he will tell me one 3am morning to the point of teariness while we’re keeping the cold out with flavourless white broth. At the next table are two ajummas who hate me– because I’m Asian but cross my chopsticks, because I’m eating with a boy whose Asian blood evades his white, white complexion. Let’s not stray, put the facts as they are. So! He might not be a douchebag, simply insistent and snickety in his interactions, too quick to assume his version is truer, stronger, better, rather enthusiastic about frat boy status. And these might not be dates, they seep away faster than slush on a mat, and at the end of the day, I’m too ruthless and unpredictable to be good for anyone on the dating floor and he becomes another casualty. Maybe the ajummas don’t hate me. They just worry.

 

The memory is not about this boy. 

 

It’s about while I’m waiting for him to don his coat in the dormitory, and you are there, obnoxious thing, looking into my eyes to see if you can push your boyish charm out of its boundaries. You succeed, because you’re adorable and we’re both hungry for ocular proof of connection. It’s funny how the eyes are described as the mirror of the soul. Most of the time they underachieve, stopping short at vanity and desperation. The other boy comes downstairs, regards us briefly and shoves his discontent into coat pockets along with a ledger of women as pain and trouble. Some months later a mishap occurs in the first ten minutes of Memento while we’re temporarily unoccupied by other forces. I’m too soused to remember it, apart from your breathy excitable accent and consideration with the toilet paper. I get angry, rightfully so, but only for awhile, and we become good friends matching each other’s best points to other people. The incident alters for good my outlook on intimacy. Another few months later, I shoot myself in the foot: setting up blunt and limiting dividers around a boy who might have been willing to read into me and be happy. I can’t tell, my dear, when you’re joking, because I’ve been nothing but blunt around you and it’s been my undoing. So I don’t know if it means anything that you still tell me your exhilarations and worries, only when I ask, only when I ask first.   

 

For all the advice I dispense, freely, sternly, chop chop– I don’t take my own. I wonder if I’m going to keep turning down people who could give me quiet nights by the river (like K might have) and promises that don’t need to be said. Looking at myself now, I run headlong into the worst kind of trouble. Boys who pair my name with experiments or rest stops, who don’t leave a seat, who flit out of range, unnamed and untameable.