She’s trying to drive me crazy.  I know she is.  There is no possible way that this is incidental.  She stands there, pushing her hair gently behind her ear, taking drags off those nasty cigarettes of hers, and she looks so bored with everything.  And then she smiles at me. That would be the beginning of the end.

Since she moved in five months ago I’ve learned so much.  I’ve learned that the sky in fact is not blue.  Nor is it really “up”.  I’ve learned that it’s not necessarily obvious that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face in Commando HAD to be painted up in camouflage.  I’ve learned that my Metallica albums are not fantastically good listening.  I’ve learned that hookers in Virginia are the most expensive imaginable, considering the assumption that I paid $200 for less than 10 minutes with one.  I’ve learned that men are messy pigs, even if girls pull clothes out of the laundry pile.  I’ve learned just because an outfit has less fabric than a baby bib doesn’t mean I’m allowed to take notice, even in a negative light.

I mean honestly why is she doing this to me?  I was under the impression that she loved me, at least a little bit. How can a mini-skirt on a Sunday afternoon NOT mean that she wants to screw my brains out?  Why in the world would painting our bedroom, a room that was once mine and mine alone, be a surprise I would do somersaults over?  And what in god’s name would lead her to believe that bright orange was the way to go with the color?

And all the “great things” I’m subjected to in a day, is possibly the most audacious part of this whole relationship’s experience.  I go to work, and exhaustedly I crawl home.  I throw open the door to our apartment and what do you suppose I find?  Well first of all I find GLOW-IN-THE-DARK stars now taped to the kitchen ceiling.  I have no the words for what this is like.  Have they been there for months and I never noticed?  Or is this the new regime of crazy?  

Then I hear it, I was too far in-shock to catch it when I walked into the kitchen.  But now it’s there, and it’s getting louder.  David Gray… she’s cranking David Gray up to the max in my beautiful speakers.  I’m delusional for listening to Stone Temple Pilots regularly, but there’s nothing wrong with David Gray.  I spend so much of this relationship speechless it’s surprising more of her friends don’t believe me to be an elective mute.  But the explosion isn’t over yet, after noting the David Gray and tearing through ever drawer in the house for my precious ear plugs, I brace myself and head for the source of the music.  Are you ready for this?  The reason she’s got David Gray blaring to the rooftops… is because she can’t hear it very well over all the jingling of the plastic CHANDALIER that she is currently installing over our bed.  This girl once told me she wanted to be an interior decorator.  Thank the lord that she didn’t ask me what I thought about her opening such a business.  I may have exploded on the spot.

When in the world did she start smoking in the apartment anyway?  Is my brain trying to save itself and putting up mental blocks? Or do these changes always come in HUMUNGOR spurts?  This surely must be what girls mean when they say they’re multi-tasking.  That they’re doing everything within one day and then nothing for the next century while you calm down and get used to the latest in your scary strange world. “This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife… how did I get here?”  I feel like from this lyric alone that the Talking Heads knew my girlfriend personally.

So now, I’m sitting in our bed, surrounded by a nearly fluorescent shade of orange, staring up at our “lovely” new chandelier, with a beer bottle tightly in my grip, and wondering… why?  I mean do I love her?  Do I really want to live like this?  Or am I just too scared of being alone?  Where is she now?  If you came home to all this, would you say anything?  Can I get away with speaking up?  I’m sorry, I want answers where none exist.  

It’s just, she’s this beautiful girl.  And she really does have finer points.  She mothers me when I’m sick.  She holds me while I fall asleep.  She lays clothes out for me when she sees I’m running late.  When I call her in the middle of the day, she knows my work day is bad, and it prompts her to make or bring home take-out of relatively normal, un-cultured foods.  But what am I supposed to do when I can feel the heart-attack waiting to happen?  Am I going to come home someday to be greeted by our new pet Wombat?  Because that’s not something I’d put past her.  It’s not about whether I can live like this, it’s whether or not I can survive it.  

(insert chugging or deep swallowing sound here)

At least she has no problem with the occasional alcohol therapy.  But as I said, I think she’s making a conscious EFFORT to drive me insane.  She might actually be trying to kill me.  Is it possible that she does in fact think that all I love chandeliers, david gray albums, and stale smoke smell?  

I need to end this.  I need to ask her to move out.  Will she cry?  What will I do if she does?  I need to tell her that I can’t take this many mass alterations of my life in one day.  Yeah, thats what, I need to lay down ground rules.  Set boundaries.  Put my foot down.  Will I see the misery that spawns from her having to hold herself back?  Will it break the spirit behind all the nut-case-ness.  Will she still be herself?  I want to kill the symptoms, but I want the cause to flourish.  You think there’s a chance I could get the best of both worlds?  I need to go to bed.

I curled up in bed, with everything I’ve been telling you, boiling and stirring inside my head.  She came into the room, crawled into an old t-shirt and climbed in next to me.  She wrapped her arm around me.  My synapses calmed down, sleep started to take its hold on me.  She leans in close and says matter-of-factly, “Honey, I think I want to have a baby.”  My eyelids are now glued to my forehead.  I’ve never been a big fan of god.  If he exists, I never felt like he could help me out.  Last night, I sat still as stone for an hour and tried to make up for twenty four years of not praying.