Broke 36,000 Words as Well as My Heart

This part that I wrote today was really difficult to write, and it is with a heavy heart that I post this today.

Yesterday I traveled the Yonge line to visit Jackie's Place, which in addition to boasting the best music, boasted a great writing session. Jackie introduced (and will soon kill off) Gordon the Vampyre, and I wrote about the confrontation between Olga and Tim when he was cheating on Sam right in front of Olga.

This is what followed:

“I’m going inside. Fernando, make sure that she doesn’t follow me in. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Tim gave me one last angry look as he slammed the door behind him.

“Follow him in,” I snorted, “why would I want to follow him in? I hate him, Fernando. I hate him so much. I don’t want to look at him anymore.”

Instead of comforting me, or really doing anything that can be considered helpful in any way, he stared at me, fuming. All of the telltale signs of Fernando anger were present: wild eyes, bulging veins, red face, clenched fists, and a menacing and smile. I feared he was unhinged. In one swift and sudden movement, he smashed the shell-covered pots that were jauntily displayed on the ledge of the restaurant entrance. Those embellished clay pots with shells were beautiful -- and practical -- containers that any gardener, or appreciator of the finer things in life, would have loved. It made my heart ache to think of all of the work that had gone into them: I made a bet with myself that someone had probably worn a protective dust mask and used latex gloves while painting and sanding the pot to a beautiful, smooth finish. But now, all of that work had gone to waste as thousands of shards littered the pier, a mess of the broken beauty that once was. I stared silently, waiting and dreading what I knew to be inevitable.

“You had no right to do that,” he said, words heavy with anger yet so calm at the same time. There were three types of Fernando anger expression: one was mild annoyance which was most often seen, the second was open and passionate Spanish anger, and the third and rarest, but also the scariest, was that eerily calm type of anger. That side of Fernando was only seen when he was the angriest; it never failed to chill me to the bone.

“What do you mean?” I responded, furious. I really only have one type of anger: unrestrained and explosive. It sweeps up everyone in its path, destroying everything and sparing nothing. “He’s terrible, and deserves to be treated that way.”

“What were you thinking? Do you have any idea what this will do to the team? You just single-handedly ruined my position on the team! Tim will be furious with me, and now I’m the guy who can’t control his girlfriend!” he shouted.

“Really?” I screamed back, quickly losing whatever semblance of self-control I had. It wasn’t very much. “You can’t control me? Is that what this is about? You hate that I actually do and say the things that I want? You wish that I would just sit around in a corset, waiting for some man to tell me what to do and think?”

“Really, Olga. Will you just shut up? For once?” he began pacing, but in an angry way. Angry pacing is the worst.

My eyes grew to the size of the shells on the shell-covered pots. Hint: they were not small.

“You can’t talk to people on my team that way,” he finished, sounding more calm than he had second before, probably regretting what he had just said. But not that much calmer.

“How come you never stand up for me?” I asked. “You heard how Tim just spoke to me, and you’re yelling at me? I’m going to be your wife. You’re supposed to be on my side!” I yelled. “How can you just stand by and watch as they treat their wives like that? Does it not matter to you? Do you think that infidelity just isn’t that bad? Are you going to start acting like them, treating women terribly and like objects that exist only for their own amusement?”

“Why don’t you understand this? I can’t take your side because I can’t fight with my team! Do you even care about that? Do you care about how difficult you’re making things?”

“Well I’m sorry, Fernando, for not being the perfect WAG that you want me to be. I know how much more you would love it if I just stood beside you looking beautiful but being completely silent, but that isn’t me! You knew that when you said that you wanted to marry me,” I said sadly.

“No, Olga, that’s not what I’m asking you to do,” he said, exasperated. “But maybe you could, for once, not tell everybody what you think. This might be a shock, but they don’t care what you think at all!”

“Well maybe they should! Someone needs to tell them that they way that they act isn’t okay,” I retorted. “I’m sorry if it causes problems but I can’t just sit by and watch this. It’s disgusting."

“I wish that you didn’t act like you don’t care about my success,” he said, seemingly out of nowhere. But really, I knew that he had thought that all along.

“What?” I erupted. “How can you say that? That isn’t true at all! All I want is for you to get everything you want from football. I would support you in your quest to win four Ballons d’Or if you suddenly decided that you wanted to be better than Fat Ronaldo!”

“Then why do you want to go to medical school? It seems like you’re looking for a way out just in case this whole football thing doesn’t work out.”

“That’s stupid,” I said coldly. Normally I would have been understanding and tried to convince him in a nice way that he was completely off the mark. But today, well, it wasn’t a normal day. It felt like the end. “You always tell me about how hard you’ve worked to get where you are, and of course that’s true, but does it not occur to you how hard I’ve worked? I went to McGill and worked my ass off for four years, not so I could just sit around making crafts, cleaning jock straps and looking pretty beside you, but so I could make something of myself! I feel like my brain is atrophying around here, I’m completely wasting my intelligence! I need to be challenged, Fernando. I need something fulfilling! Why is it so hard for you to understand that I want to have my own life and accomplish things for myself? Are all of the women around you really that pathetic?”

“So now it’s pathetic to love your husband?” he asked, sounding more hurt than I had ever seen him.

“How dare you accuse me of not loving you,” I shouted back. “Everything I do, I have done out of love. I work a job that I hate so that I can be close to you. I left everything and everyone I loved to move in with you, across an ocean! I sit alone at home, waiting for you to come home. It’s the best part of my day. I don’t have any friends, except one, and when I finally stand up for her, you yell at me and tell me that I have no right to talk to people that way that I don’t respect, and you shouldn’t either. I don’t do anything but support you. All I have done every day since the day that we met is love you.”

“Don’t act so self-righteous about it, everything you’ve done you’ve only done it grudgingly. Will you ever let me forget all of the sacrifices that you’ve made?”
“Don’t talk to me about sacrifice,” I shot. “It seems as though all I do is sacrifice. It sometimes feels as though I only exist anymore to be everything you need. Will it ever matter what I want? Football completely controls my life and makes every decision for us. Anything I want to do has to come second to your dreams.”

“You knew this about me when you said that you would marry me,” he said petulantly.

“I know,” I said, as my eyes welled up. “But I didn’t think that it would be like this. I don’t know if I can get used to always coming in second after football.”

For the first time, he was silent. But that silence was more telling than words could have ever been. I realized that the vision that I had on that day in Spain of our lives together was completely naïve. I thought that our children would think that Fernando was their hero, but really, they wouldn’t know him at all. Neither would I. Fernando would always be gone, and even when he was there, his mind would be somewhere else, thinking about the next match. I was delusional enough to think of all of the time that we could spend together. Really, I would be alone.

I thought that we would build our lives together and that they would be full of love. But as I thought about it, I realized that it wouldn’t be very long until Fernando didn’t love me at all. He had this image of me that he loved, but it wasn’t who I was at all; there was a growing disparity between what he was asking me to be and what I wanted for myself. Those two Olgas would never match up.

“What the hell is wrong with everyone?” I cried in frustration. “How can everyone always act as if everything is just fine? Smile like everything’s wonderful? It isn’t! I’m tired of pretending that it is!”

“What are you saying?” he almost whispered.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I could hardly get out.

“No,” he said as he grabbed my arm. I tried to struggle, to get away, but with every passing second I felt like I was getting smaller and weaker. “We can make this work.”

“How can you even say that? Everything’s broken.”

“We just have to remember when we were in Spain. Everything was so perfect then,” he offered. I almost wanted to laugh, but at that moment, I felt like I would never be able to laugh again.

“Fernando,” I said as I touched his face, “I can’t be that girl that fell in love with you in Buñol. That wasn’t the real world, Fernando, it was just a fantasy. This is what the real world is like. In the real world, you only love your memory of me. You’re asking me to be something that I just can’t be happy doing.”

“But I do love you,” he said weakly. For once, Fernando looked as vulnerable as I had always felt.

“I know, Fernando,” I moved my hand from his cheek to his hand and squeezed it. I wasn’t ready for what was to come, and I almost needed Fernando’s hand to steady me. It was disgustingly ironic. “But sometimes love isn’t enough.”

Tears obscured my vision as I turned and walked away. I quickly began running, forcing myself to move away because every part of my body wanted to turn around and fall into Fernando’s arms. Fernando didn’t run after me. I’m not sure whether it was because he was too stunned, or because he knew that I was right. I still wonder if I left so he would chase me and prove to me that what my worry that our relationship was over was wrong. Maybe I thought that if we caught me, everything would be okay. But it wasn’t. I was running, and he wasn’t chasing. The perfect metaphor for what our love had always been.

My arm, that felt like it wasn’t even my arm, hailed the next taxi. In a voice that didn’t sound like my voice, I spoke.

“Take me to the airport.”