Emma came back to Portland like a spanish bomb and exploded my life.
She was unhappy the second she got there. I met her at the house she was going to temporarily stay in after she finished the drive up from San Francisco. I was so excited to see her I felt like a frog riding a horse with a sword and a pistol by my side.
We carried her stuff in and checked out the room her friend was letting her use. It was alright. We checked out the bed, it was alright. The sex was also alright, even though we hadn’t seen each other in months. Because Emma was worried about the rest of the house hearing. The bed was made from cinder blocks and plywood and made a ton of noise. And we didn’t want to shake a block loose. She was weird about me sleeping there too, and since I was currently sharing a room with my friend Peter, we didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Emma was quiet and inscrutable and difficult to talk to.
“What do you wanna do? I can go grab us some food and we can watch something. Or do you wanna grab a drink somewhere? Where are you at?”
She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head in miniscule motions.
“Are you pretty tired from the drive?”
She shrugged again. Her face was placid. She looked like a child.
It was like some witch had put a curse on my girlfriend, or she was possessed by a hateful shade, or a dark personality. She was like a different person. All the time after she came back to Portland. All the time just quiet and impassive and bad-tempered.
We broke up after a couple weeks.
It happened in her car.
She had picked me up from Peter’s place, where I was living at the time, with her friend Kayla, who was visiting from San Francisco. We went out for dinner and drinks and then back to Emma’s new place. She hated her new place because before her old roommates were her best friends and her old house was her house and now since her old roommates had graduated like me, her new roommates were some nice girls who went to school with her and her house was their house with her room in it.
We went there and hung out a while and had some more drinks, I think Kayla fell asleep on the couch and Emma and I went and fucked in her room. It was okay, like fucking a blow-up doll. She’d been weird and emotionless towards me all night. Then she wanted to take me home so Kayla could sleep in her bed with her.
I thought it was all fucking weird especially because Kayla had been so cool and said she wanted to sleep on the couch so that I could stay and then we could all hang out in the morning. But Emma wasn’t into it. She wanted to take me home. And then in the car she was being super cold and kinda mean. I couldn’t take it.
“What’s your deal?”
She looked at me, just barely, kept driving.
“Why are you like this all the time?”
“Like what?”
“Like mean. You act annoyed at everything I say.”
She didn’t look at me, only shrugged a quick careless little shoulder lift.
“It wasn’t like this before, why are you being this way now? I just don’t get it.”
“I dunno.”
“Everything feels so weird and forced with you now. I don’t want it to be. It was so easy before. I just don’t get it, I hate this. It was so good before. Why isn’t it good now?”
“It just isn’t,” she said.
She still wouldn’t look at me.
“That’s it?” I said. We were getting pretty close to being back at Peter’s place.
“Yeah, that’s it. It just isn’t good anymore.”
“I don’t get it. Why not? I feel like it’s just because you’re so mean all the time, what’s been up with that?”
“It’s all my fault?” she said.
“No. No, that’s not what I mean. You know how I always say things completely the wrong way when I get emotional.”
“Yeah,” she smiled, and it seemed like she couldn’t help it. “It’s cute when you’re being lovey and super dumb and annoying when I’m mad at you.”
“Thank you,” I said. I smiled at her even though I felt like crying. “I don’t think it’s all your fault, I just feel like I feel the same way about you and I feel like you don’t feel the same way about me.”
By now we were stopped in front of this abandoned church down the little residential street Peter lived on. One or two street lights cast ominous shadows off the alders and the jagged glass in the churchyard.
She still wouldn’t look at me. Only shrugged that infuriating little shrug again.
“You don’t feel the same way you felt about me before?”
Now she was crying, I could just barely see the streetlights glinting off the wetness under her eyes, a single teardrop on her smooth cheek. She shook her head.
“You don’t?” I said. I had to choke on the words.
“No,” she said. And finally looked at me, looked me square in my face and said it. “I don’t. I don’t know why, but I don’t.”
“And there’s nothing we can do?”
“I don’t know what to do. No, there’s nothing.”
“So what? Do we just break up?” I didn’t mean it as a real option at all.
“Yeah, I guess we just break up,” she said.
Then we had some dumb sappy crying and kissing and maybe we’ll talk soon thing in the car and I got out and walked into Peter’s place like I’d just committed a murder and still had blood on me.
I went out on the porch to smoke a spliff. My hands were shaking and it was hard to roll. I rolled an ugly little thing. I smoked and I listened to Neil Young and I cried.
I looked up at the few stars that shone through the polluted sky. I looked for angels or ghosts or aliens. I tried as hard as I could to see them. I squinted so the tears got squished and my eyes got blurry and I tried to see them. I tried even just to see a constellation. The way they were supposed to look. Like Orion the Hunter could tell me what I was supposed to do to make things work out. All I wanted was to meet a girl and have everything go right. I wanted aliens or ghosts or angels or Orion the Hunter to tell me what to do. I squinted and squished my tears and tried to see something. But all I saw were a few sad quiet stars.