Our Last Fight
I told JC this weekend that I was moving out.
Was it prompted by a stranger on the internet calling me codependent?
No … but also, not no.
“Why would you move out?” JC, asked.
Which was a good question, because I love living here.
“We’re not a couple,” I told him.
“We basically are.” he said.
“If we’re together, don’t you think it’s weird that I’m dating other people?”
“Well, kind of, ya,” he said and went back to his adult coloring book.
I grabbed a pink colored pencil from the box and started outlining some hearts on a page in a different coloring book.
He had asked me earlier where the coloring books he ordered were. I lied and said I threw them away.
Why? Because fucking with my ex is my favorite pastime.
“Oh you better not have!”
JC huffed as he rifled around the drawers.
I stood straight faced watching him panic that his precious Temu coloring books were toast. A wave of relief washed over him when he found them tucked away in the laundry room.
“You’re an asshole!”
He said as he brought the bucket of markers to the coffee table and sat down, crisscross applesauce, on the floor.
Throwing things away is one of our biggest fights and one of my biggest joys.
Every time I come across a screw or odd piece of plastic that looks like it could be important, I immediately toss it in the trash.
JC holds on to everything.
The cardboard box from anything he’s ever bought, work clothes that are basically paint-covered scraps, and every pair of shoes he’s owned since the seventh grade.
Me? I let things go.
Well … some things; relationships not so much. I hold on to people longer than I probably should.
I rounded out the corners of my heart on the coloring page that said …
“Sassy as Fuck.”
JC added blue to the flames on his page that said …
“Oh Hell No.”
“JC, if you thought we were still together, lets just stay together. I’m tired. I don’t want to date anymore.”
I pleaded as I reached for a darker shade of pink to start working on the word …
“Fuck.”
“I can’t commit to that right now,”
JC said, not looking up from his …
“No,”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You have our wedding date tattooed on your finger and you can’t commit to me right now?!”
I slammed my coloring book shut.
“Stand up,” I demanded.
It took him a minute to brace himself to get his forty-five year old knees from the floor to upright.
Mad as a wet hen, I said …
“I’m going to kick your ass now, and you’re going to stand there and take it.”
Weighing in at a foot shorter and hundred pounds lighter than him,
JC, tried not to laugh, as he told me I wasn’t “legally” allowed to beat him up.
To which I rolled my eyes and told him to formally give consent for me to at least punch him in the gut as hard as I could.
He nodded and put his hands behind his back.
In that moment I wished I could punch harder. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I wanted him to know how bad he hurt me.
The thing is, JC doesn’t hurt anyone on purpose, his actions do. Or inaction, I should say.
I know this about him, I make no mistake, he can never love me in the way I need him to. He’s shown me that in multiple ways over the years, it’s just that, there are so many glimmers of hope.
We get along better than most couples I know. We could very well have a love and relationship worth working on, but I can’t be the only one showing up to the therapy appointments.
You can’t strong arm someone into loving you properly and unfortunately you can’t punch anyone into submission.
I will say, it felt really good to sock him in the gullet a few times.
I’m not condoning violence but he’s slapped me on the ass enough times to balance that out.
The next morning in the kitchen, me making my smoothie, JC making his coffee, he said to me …
“I’m so proud of you.”
“For what?” I asked.
“Changing. You didn’t throw or break anything. You used to rip the goddamn paintings off the walls when we were fighting,”
He pressed the button on the Ninja coffee maker a second time to get his money’s worth from the pod.
“But I punched you, J.”
I said, pressing the button on my five-hundred dollar blender.
“I know. I kinda liked it,”
He kissed me on the top of the head, then left for work.
I hope people catch on to how delightful and funny and kind, JC is. Will he be a passionate, madly in love guy? I dunno. Do you need more than he is willing to give especially time wise? Yes. But I know even as a mother in law that if anyone in our family needed anything, JC would be there. Hell, JC's dad would be there. There is a genuine, true, honesty that's hard to find in this world, you and JC have that in common.
I relate to this a lot in that I could have continued to cohabitate with my ex as roommates. I also wasn’t eager to make the divorce real. He is a solid, intelligent guy that makes me laugh like nobody’s business. We just didn’t fit romantically in the long run.