All things go stale
In an effort to keep with this whole blogging more in 2010 thing I’m trying, I thought I’d dig out a short story I wrote a few months ago (well, a month or two ago) for a challenge a friend of mine laid out. The challenge? Be creative, and include eggs. So I wrote this story extemporaneously. There’s a bit of profanity, so sensitive minded folk be warned and be aware that this is a story about real people who maybe don’t have the same standards as you. It would be false art to not let them speak the way they would speak if they were real. That is all. Hope you enjoy. Feel free to critique…I’m a tough guy.
Margo took a long drag from her cigarette as she stirred the yellow mess in the skillet. Margo’s eggs always taste like shit. I don’t know why I don’t just cook them myself. I’m a much better cook than she. But Margo insists on keeping with the social gender paradigm, and so here I sit drinking my coffee while she cooks her shitty eggs. We’ve been together for four years and six months or so; we’ve both gotten comfortable. Truth be told, being so comfortable is making me very uncomfortable. We stay together because it’s easy, and because it makes sense, but I can’t remember the last time I told her I loved her or vice versa. We continue to wake every morning to strong coffee and shitty eggs, and kiss emotionlessly as we head off to our dead end jobs. God, how did I end up in this life?
Five years ago I was a sophomore in college, the world ahead of me and dreams in my eyes. Dreams filled with beautiful big breasted women and loads upon loads of cash, but dreams nonetheless. I met Margo that Christmas, at a bar. A group of us decided to stay in town for Christmas instead of going home to our depressing home-from-school lives. We were at our usual haunt and I was at the bar ordering my White Russian when she sat next to me. At first glance she wasn’t what you’d call ‘hot,’ whatever that means. Average height; average build; anonymously brunette hair; Then I saw her eyes, which were made of the deepest, most piercing emerald I’d ever seen. I found myself staring and, a few seconds later, she did too. She introduced herself. I introduced myself. We talked for a few minutes before I remembered I was at this bar with friends. I excused myself to return to our booth when Margo stopped me. Maybe you’d like to call me sometime. Maybe I would.
And now, here we are. I could tell you the rest of the story, but it’s mostly uninteresting. It’s the same story you’ve heard a million times from a million books and a million movies and a million lame four-chord songs.
But the truth is, I’m not sure how we got to this point. Bored with each other, bored with everything, we aimlessly walk through our lives. I have a conversation with at least one of my friends at least once a month about how I should just leave her, move on, find a new person, a new life. I never have the balls to do it. Ten bucks says Margo has the same conversation with her friends. That’s the other thing. We have my friends, and we have her friends. I can’t think of anyone we’d call ‘our’ friend. What the hell kind of relationship is that?
Anyway, I got home from work before Margo, which isn’t surprising. She works in the restaurant business, a business notorious for long double shifts that never seem to end. I know this, because I barely escaped the business myself. Me, I push paper. Well, cut it, copy it, frame it, bind it. An assortment of things. That’s right, I work at Kinko’s. Don’t judge. Sure, I escaped one horrible dead end business and jumped right into another one, but what do you expect me to do? I dropped out of college after my junior year. Got bored with it, decided to move in with Margo and live the Bohemian life. We listened to Rent a lot back then. That Bohemian crap lasted about a year, but it was too late to go back to school. I was stuck in the never-ending cycle of working a job to make money to go back to school while being unable to go back to school because I had a job but being unable to quit the job because I had bills because I had stupidly dropped out of college and moved in with my girlfriend thereby forfeiting myself from any of my parent’s charity. Thanks a lot, mom and dad.
Margo just got home, she brought take-out from Chang’s. Thank God, no shitty spaghetti or whatever other concoction she would’ve decided to attempt tonight. We’ll eat our Chinese food from cheap paper boxes with cheap chop-sticks and hop into bed to watch a few sitcoms before we go to bed and wake up a few hours later to start it all over again.
I bet she makes some shitty eggs.