None of this Never Happened, Not at All, I Swear

"A little thing called Pride"

If I was just a little more feminine I would have cared. I would have felt remorse that I was walking all over him. But, like people making excuses for themselves always say, it's a man's world, and following tenets, I refused to care, because men never care (that's why they can't cry, the damn bastards). Still it was unbearable. The feeling of guilt, equivalent in severity to, I suppose, running over your neighbor's dumb and deaf dog with your SUV at 4 AM on the road outside your house, stayed near my train of thought even when more important things, like my daily half hour of television, should have been taking center stage. I didn't hate myself, though I refused to look at myself in the bathroom mirror while brushing my teeth. He wanted me to feel bad. But I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing he was at all important to me. Because I didn't fucking care.

The number of missed calls my phone reported became more like a casualty report. Two opportunities died the other day at 3:17 in the afternoon. How he endured, I'll never know. I'd only reply in impersonal texts that were short and nondescript, like, "Sure. Sounds fine." Even though his plans for lunch always sounded horrible. Who the fuck like Thai soup? It's all watered down. Canned soup tastes better, but it's probably all thanks to the sodium; 20% of your daily allowance? What the fuck.

But if I could show him in person that I no longer cared, then it was worth the train ride to the edges of Chinatown, even though there weren't any Chinese in the city. It should have been called Asian town, but that would probably sound even more offensive. At least it wasn't Oriental town. Then nobody would visit for fear of being labeled a racist through association.

My yellow trench coat kept catching my attention in the windows of the stores I walked past. I hadn't brushed my hair. I had taken a shower, but only out of common courtesy. If I wasn't trying to send a message, I would have had an eyeliner stripe a centimeter thicker underneath my green eyes. It was January, and my cheeks were flushed red. I should have been in love. Catching the neon Budweiser sign hanging in the Thai restaurant's window, I fully realized that if what he thought this was was love, then there was no God and everything anyone had ever told me about life had been a wishful euphemism.

If I had seen him, I would have probably told him flat out to give up already. I had rehearsed it hundreds of times. Sometimes he cried. Sometimes I cried but tried to cover it up by looking away or wearing sunglasses. Sometimes he shot me in the back of my head when I turned one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to leave, my blood splattering on his white wooden door, mixed in with a little brain. But he wasn't there. He stood me up. I stood outside the restaurant, feeling cold enough to order a soup anyway, as long as it was still steaming when it was placed before me. After considering whether his actions might have been a more blunt message indicating he was tired of my games, I reminded myself patiently that it didn't matter what he had meant or what he was thinking. I was going to fuck him up.