home again

    The drive is supposed to take 7 hours but usually takes closer to 8 or 9. Especially if I am driving and no matter how much I speed. Driving all day like that fucking sucks.

    The whole morning before the drive was infuriating too. Connor had an interview, and he was so nervous that he was acting crazy, kind of like how I act when I’m nervous, which is literally all the time. I am thinking about that and how hard it must be to live with me while he is standing outside the bathroom door, counting down the minutes until I have to turn off the water—finished or not—so that his interviewers won’t hear any background noise on their Skype call.

And, really, the worst part is that I know he is just being crazy because of his interview and so I have to roll with it. As he demands that I close a window to keep out the noise from a distant lawnmower, my instinct is to call him an ass and carry on with a nice long shower. But I fight that instinct. He also hates pep talks, so when I try to be a good girlfriend and tell him he’s going to do great, he tells me again that he doesn’t need stuff like that.

Thankfully for both of us and our relationship, I make it out of the shower with minutes to spare. I crawl back into bed, curl up with my phone, and try not to make a goddamn sound as I listen to every single word coming from the next room. My stomach churns with secondhand anxiety. Job interviews fucking suck.

When it’s finally over, I clomp into the kitchen and make as much noise as possible putting the dishes away. EXCEPT: Connor was the one who did the dishes the night before. (He actually does do them sometimes.) He’d asked me what to do with a pan of bacon grease, and I told him about that thing where you fold a piece of foil and shove it to make a little container at the top of a coffee cup. That way, once the oil cools and solidifies, you can just take the whole thing out of the cup and throw it away. EXCEPT: I don’t even know why he asked because he began pouring grease into the coffee cup—sans foil—while I was in the middle of explaining how to do it.

So then when he goes to wash the dishes, that’s the first one he washes to prove how easy it is to do it his way. EXCEPT: then he uses the same scrubber to wash the rest of the dishes—doing a completely half-assed job—and smears grease all over everything.

I realize this slowly as I am putting away the greasy dishes and bein yelling at Connor for making a mess. His interview is over, and with it, his anxiety. I am allowed to be mean again. I have to re-wash the worst offenders, the silverware. Because those are his least favorite thing to wash, he did an extra half-assed job on those. His best defense is that we’re going out of town for a week, so we won’t even remember the dishes, now in our cupboards, are still kind of dirty when we get back. It upsets me that he is right. I switch from yelling to laughing, with a little yelling sprinkled in because it’s not fair that he can get out of shit like this by being cute.

When we finally make it to the car, I pop an audiobook into the CD player Connor didn’t know he had until the night before. Neither of us knows how to work the thing, and we can’t find the pause button anywhere in his whole car. While pressing random buttons and hoping for the best, he set the tracks to play randomly, which is a terrible choice for an audiobook with a linear storyline. After we finally get the thing playing, I plug in my phone to charge. The car, thinking it’s being helpful, switches away from the audiobook and begins playing “Amish Paradise,” the last song I’d been listening to, unironically belting my heart out to it the night before. We have to figure out the whole audiobook thing all over again.

Then we drive all day, and it fucking sucks.

But then it’s nice to be home. To hug my parents and pet my dog. My mom sips chamomile tea next to me on the couch as we catch up and then agree at 9 pm to call it a night. I go into my bedroom and finish the book I’d been halfway through on my last visit.

I think about brushing my teeth but eat three tomatoes instead. When I do make it to the bathroom sink, I decide again to not brush my teeth and instead dig through my sister’s and my bathroom treasures. Our cabinets and drawers are filled with things we once found fascinating but have left behind. (My sister has much cooler treasures because she has better taste in stuff.)

I find the toothpaste I’ll need if I ever get around to brushing my teeth. (I don’t know why I hate brushing them so much. I don’t have dental insurance and should ostensibly, by now, know better.) I find three new lipsticks that are basically the same color and this hair thing that’s supposed to give you a French twist but just gets hopelessly stuck in my hair soon after I figure out how to use it. I find my old glasses and put them on. My face in the mirror doesn’t look like the face that used to wear them. It’s rounder and older and looks a little more like my dad’s. I find a JoJo Moyes book I used to read on the toilet and kept hidden in my bathroom drawer. (I am taking a stand here to say that’s it’s time we all stop pretending that we don’t read on the toilet all the time.)

Going through these old things is a lot like coming home. All the memories and all that shit. It feels good and it doesn’t. I’m already dreading and looking forward to making that drive with Connor again, spending 7-9 house alone together, loving every frustrating second of it.