50 Shades of Shut The Fuck Up
In a few days, I’m going to visit Naoko again, probably for the last time. My friends have been reading the texts and listening to me explain the context of how a couple of people who have decided not to see each other any more have wound up agreeing to spend a day and night together on an intimate occasion a few days before one of them leaves the country.
To a man, they are describing it as a booty call.
Is this a problem? I don’t know. All along, I’ve been saying that I’m getting hurt one way or another, and at least this way, I get to see her one last time before getting hurt (there may be other, more corporeal, benefits too). After all, I like that. And if I get to do that with her again, I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy it, even if I spend the rest of the night awake and thinking about her going and hoping somehow this last evening will change things, which it won’t.
But what if I’m wrong? And what if there are kinds of hurt you never fully recover from, kinds of hurt you don’t so much heal as heal around? Lily used to say that hearts don’t break, but rather they flatten, and they stay flat till someone pumps them up again. Another friend by contrast (let’s call him Chinaski for his unreconstructed language) described it differently: he said every breakup is a knife plunged into you and twisted: not fatal perhaps, but it will never stop bleeding.
I’m not sure who’s right. Lily is the eternal optimist. Chinaski once announced that he was breaking up with his girlfriend because ‘she looked at me wrong’. They might both be onto something, though.
Ultimately none of it really matters. I’m going, I know that. So I’ll just wait and see what kind of hurt accumulates. I keep wondering how I will think back on these days. I worry that I will one day look back and unwittingly repeat the last four sentences of The Sense of an Ending.
Some Miscommunication 