Let me know what you think. I may need all the help I can get! (my psychiatrist hasn't got back to me on that one yet, so I might). I read it again and I'll admit that it's quite depressing, now that I've had distance from it. -E
The Bow
She’s wearing that ridiculous bow again. There it is, on top of her head, with the thick red ribbon that she slides under her chin. Thank God she doesn’t tie it in a bow under her chin anymore. Jesus, she used to have a bow on top of her head and a bow underneath her head to match; one velour tumor growing off of her is enough. She started wearing that thing two months ago, centered at the top of her head, but now it’s slid down a bit over the months to just behind her right ear. She finally got the bright idea to cut the ribbon to length, glue the ends together, and slide it under her chin, like a bonnet. At least she had one bright idea left in that vapid little brain.
And here we are again, another night, at the same Thai restaurant, in the same booth, facing the same direction. I face the door, so that when I finally get the balls to make an exit I can make sure that no one is going to be in my way when I do it. I don’t want to kill anyone in my mad rush to get out. Well, not by accident, anyway.
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We’re here again at Boon-Nam -- every girl’s dream restaurant Every night that we get into the car to go for dinner I feel like I’m a dog, going to the vet, and I’ve been tricked into going. I want to scratch my way out in the middle of the freeway and run like hell. I always get Pad Thai. I eat Pad Thai four nights a week. I want to try something different but he just says, “No…that’s too hot for you,” or “no…you know that you don’t like to try new things, you’re not adventurous.” Sometimes he embarrasses me in front of the waitresses when he says those things, because he makes me look stupid and incapable of making decisions. How does he even know that I’m not adventurous? He never lets me be myself, so how would he know? I’ve been to many places in my life; I lived in Suriname for 3 years for Christ’s sake. How adventurous does he want me to be? He makes me feel bad about trying new things. I know what it is; I know that he wants me to be her. I know that deep down he misses her. He wants another pretentious little girl, one who’s been to Ethiopia or to India and saved the world, one diary entry at a time, or the girl who can ramble off book titles but can’t ramble off the content to back them up. He wants someone like him, all titles and no content, all diary entries and no action. Ugh, he wants the female equivalent of himself.
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Don’t try to be something that you’re not, please, just stop while you’re ahead. Quit pretending to be cultured. I want to say something to her about how ridiculous she is but I can’t speak; my tongue is frozen to my teeth. The only reason I take her here is because she loves Pad Thai so much. She has to love it, she orders it every night. Sometimes she tries to order something else and I remind her of how much she loves it, and she always orders it in the end. She’s so sloppy with those chopsticks, she doesn’t know how to hold them properly. God, Lydia was so elegant with chopsticks; she made them look so easy. I still have the journal that I kept from that trip and I still read the entries. Lydia didn’t wear that bright red lipstick, either, and her eyelashes were a bit longer. I think that Lydia was much prettier. She never ordered Pad Thai at Boon-Nam, she always ordered Cho Muang. She was so smart.
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I’m trying to eat quickly, without saying anything, to get out of here as fast as possible. My bow is unraveling, too – I can feel the ribbon dangling as a strip against my ear. The reason I wear it is because I found it, from the first present that Rob ever gave me, which was a bouquet of flowers. They were violets, my favorite. He hasn’t bought me flowers since. He sits there and eats Cho Muang, those little violet flower dumplings, and that’s the closest thing to flowers that I ever get from him.
He’s thinking about Lydia again. I know he is because he always twists his watch around on his wrist when he thinks about her. Whenever he’s about to bring her up he stares into the distance without focusing on anything, twists his watch for a few minutes, then says something about her. I hope he’s not going to say her name right now, I don’t think that I can handle that. What a terrible and selfish person he is to think about her, especially right now, at the same restaurant we’ve been going to for the last two years because he doesn’t want to show me off anywhere else. I gave up everything for him. I left my job, I left my home, and I left my family. Hell, I even left my cats because he’s allergic to them; I had to leave them with my sister. I have never felt so lonely in my entire life. He climbed out of the emotional pool that we shared together so that he could dive right back into the mess that was Lydia.
