Dinner tonight was pizza. I don't mean homemade or real pizza or even one of those mediocre frozen ones. I just ended up ordering one because I didn't feel like cooking anything, and then I just ended up leaving most of it on the stove because after all that I didn't feel like eating anything. I know, I know, it's not becoming of a university professor to be so damn mopey, but I just wasn't feeling it at all, not after saying goodbye to the girl this morning for what I knew to be the last time.
I don't suppose it could've lasted forever, I know she would've eventually gotten bored on her own, but I wanted to cut it short not to end it on my own terms, but just because I knew it would be better. It was a fun month and all but thirty nights of this is long enough, and I guess I was starting to feel like I was taking advantage of her, because I know she shouldn't be sticking around anymore. She should be out at that bar that I met her at right now finding some young beauty like her, who might not be such a great storyteller but is more appropriate for someone her age, someone that she actually deserves. While I eat terrible delivered pizza in my kitchen while moping about how I'll be sleeping alone even though it's entirely my own doing.
There's a knock at the door and I ignore it. Not tonight. I don't care if it's a charity or Jehova's Witnesses or guy from the natural gas company coming to check the meter or UPS or whoever, they can come back some other time. I don't have anything better to do but I also don't have the patience. Instead I just take another slice of the pizza, forcing myself to eat because I know I really should, not because of any apetite. It's cold already. I curse to myself and dump the whole thing in the garbage. There's another knock at the door, and I sigh a little, thinking maybe I should go answer that after all. I walk across the house and the person at the door knocks again, impatiently, before I finally make it to the hallway and open the door.
It's her.
She tells me she's glad that I'm here, that she was worried that I had gone out or wasn't going to answer the door, and she looks so incredibly cute with her worried expression and her open dress and her arms behind her back that all I can say is "What are you doing here?" And then she just smiles and asks why she wouldn't be here, and she puts her right arm forward to reveal that she was hiding flowers behind her back, handing them to me, then taking out her other arm to reveal a plastic bag, and as I'm stumbling to accept the flowers she asks me if I like Chinese food.
"Why are you here?" I ask again, perplexed, "That was it, the story's over, I don't have anything more," I say. And she laughs and she says she knows, and then she confidently walks inside the house and closes the door behind her, and she tells me that she thought the ending was a little heavy handed but that was fine with her. And still shocked by her inviting herself in I explain to her that it's over, that I had fun but she needs to move on because I have nothing left to give her.
She grins, and brushes a lock of my white hair aside. Then she kisses me sweetly, and she says, "Of course you do."