Please enjoy this post where I tell you a story about an event from my life. Nothing more, nothing less. Today’s story: a very cold woman.
In my mind I call them “the twins.” This is unflattering. Possibly downright mean but in the privacy of my own mind I can be as petty as I want. The thing is that as much as I would like for them to visit me, I don’t want them to visit me together. They live on two separate sides of the country, they have two entirely separate lives, hell they don’t even look like each other but I can feel in my gut that they’re no good together. They have the type of personalities that make them interesting when you’re alone with them but disastrous at a party and worse off, I really only like one of them.
The fact that they have the same name is just the glue that holds the pieces together.
I’d like to pull the twins apart. As if their bodies were merged like melted taffy. I’d like to slowly sand the edges off each one until they no longer fit. But that’s not how people work and so they come to visit as a unit. As a cohesive body. As a blight against my wishes.
One stands stunted height, blue eyes, blond hair, wild and messy, cornfield ready. The other tall and soft, chestnut skin with observant dark pools for eyes, coy and vibrant. I think they’re not as alike as they are different but then I’m wrong. Apart they are storms, together they are a hurricane. Low pressure belts merging and twinning.
They fly in on an airplane. Maybe from the same place, maybe not and my house is too small to hold them so our mutual friend takes up the mantel. They’re supposed to come by for dinner and I so come home from work early and spend two hours meticulously preparing a meal. I roast a chicken, I make bread, I try to make my house warm and welcome and then I sit. And I wait.
It’s a new city for them but they’re with my other friend so when the clocks ticks 15 minutes late, I simply send a text and decide to catch up on some reading. I get a text back that they’re getting ready and won’t be there for 20 minutes but I try to shrug it off. Travel is hard, life is weird, shit happens. No one thinks about the lady with the anxiety disorder who gets nervous you died if you’re late. No one is wondering if I’ve taken this news poorly and if you don’t reply to the single text I sent at least giving up some kind of update that I will lay there, consumed by fear, until you do. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ll be fine once I see them.
After 60 minutes I lay on the floor and stare at the bottles of wine I’ve bought in preparation. After 75 minutes I open one in hopes of salvaging some joy out of food gone cold, out of plans changed to the point of anxiety, out of the fear that sits in my throat that something horrible has happened and no one is telling me what it is.
They text me 2 hours and 10 minutes later that they are at the light rail station four blocks from my house. I walk down the hill and they aren’t there. I wait another 20 minutes starring endlessly as two tram cars park in the station, expel all their passengers in a last gasp, and still they are not there. When they finally roll off the train in the middle of downtown they are wearing onesies at 9:10pm, high as kites, carrying booze. I give up.
We walk back to the house and I try to serve dinner wherein they tell both tell me they’ve eaten already and I sit there, on the couch, eating my bowl of soup, shoving a piece of bread into my mouth with one hand and then putting it down to take a large swig of alcohol with my other. I apologize for my demeanor and explain that I don’t mind lateness as long as I’m updated with some semblance of a plan. They both agree this sounds reasonable and we get rowdily drunk and dance over the course of two hours where I slowly let my worry slip from me. They just didn’t know, I tell myself. This was a mistake but not it wasn’t malicious.
They tell me that tomorrow we’ll have the whole day to hang out and we make plans to meet at 1pm in the marketplace. To make it even less complicated I tell them they can just take the same transport they used to get to my house and I’ll pick them up at the station. I repeat the name of the stop and they nod.
I should see the red flags but I don’t. Or I willfully ignore them. When it passes 1am, I tell them its time to go but they don’t know how to get back to my friends house. I sigh and punch her address into one of their phones and then herd them downstairs into a taxi and go to sleep.
The next day at 1:35pm and I’m sitting at the station ripping through a piece of paper nervously. Texts remain unanswered, calls go to voicemail, and water soaks through the ceiling and drips on the floor next to me. It’s me again, playing the fool. Despite living the wonderful and connected age of cell phones and constant communication somehow I have managed to find the only people my age not surgically attached to their phones. And it builds behind my eyes, that pressure. That fear. That anger.
It’s my husband’s birthday as a cherry on top and as he sits watching me stew and becoming increasingly bored and annoyed. We eventually leave to get lunch and by nearly 3pm we finally get a message from them after nearly two hours wandering out in wait. It turns out that they got a slow start, got high, and then once they managed to get on the light rail they got off at the wrong stop because they couldn’t remember the name. I ask where they are now and there’s a long pause. “I would tell you but I cannot read the words on signs.”
Standing at the corner of Pike Place Market I wonder if I have made some sort of grave mistake in my life. I patiently wait on the phone while they find some street signs and I tell them I’ll lead them around the market when they get there but that’s going to be it for the day. This is probably too nice. This is a lesson in being too nice. Eventually they are able to read a sign and I stay on the phone giving them step by step directions. By the time they reach the market everything is starting to wind down and close but I figure there’s just enough time to show them a few things. They seem excited and happy at first but after about 15 minutes and one stall later they stare at me sort of confused.
“Problem?” I wonder if I have something on my face. “Well I just thought it would be more exciting,” twin 1 starts in. “Isn’t there anything to do here?” twin 2 asks with hands on her hips. I grow weary too. I decide to show them the weird basement interior inside the market, the comic store, the hall of magic, the gum wall, the spice store, the meat and fish area, the cheese store but with each passing minute they grow weary of me and I grow of them. Eventually the market is closing in full swing and I tell them I want to stop in the chocolate store to buy my husband a birthday present before we go. They follow me into the store but eventually wander out before I make my final purchase.
As I stand at the register my phone rings. My friend whose house they are staying at asks me where the twins are. I see them outside the window, sighing and pointing at things. Rolling their eyes like the whole of Seattle is too drab to be noteworthy. My friend tells me that they made her dogs sick and then just left them there and she isn’t sure if she can make the party we had planned at a bar tonight. I sympathize and tell her that I hope her dogs will be okay and I’ll keep her updated. I pay for my chocolates and exit the store where I am immediately accosted by Twin 1 demanding that I take them to a food establishment. I list a few food places but instead of agreeing to one she just cuts me off nd starts to tell me that she’s been bored this entire trip and she wants to know if there is anything good to do in this city and if I do anything cool.
This is the part of the story where I lose my shit.
This is the part of the story where I stand, on the sidewalk, in front of 100+ passerby’s in one of the most crowded places in Seattle and I tell them exactly what I think of their behavior. How they treated me. How they treated my friend. How they act in public and how frankly rude and insensitive they are. I yell so long and so loud that people start to gather around us to stare. And when I’m done, red faced and weary, she sheepishly mutters
“Ugh, you have no chill”
“You’re god damn right I have no chill!”
I direct us to a restaurant two doors down and inform them that either they eat at this place with me and my husband or they leave right now but after that whatever happens to them is not my responsibility. We eat in the most mediocre restaurant in a silence so terse that the waitress nervously looks between us a dozen times before placing the check in front of my husband at the end of the meal.
When we walk outside, I tell them everyone is going to a bar tonight and they can show up or not and I didn’t give a shit because it’s true I have absolutely no chill for people who treat me like that. I hail them a cab, slam the door shut in their faces and do not watch it leave as it heads off to my friends house.
They do show up at the bar for 20 minutes later that night before leaving the bar for “somewhere better” and they block me on Facebook in the morning. Like people with no chill!