New Year’s Day

(originally posted 1/1/2013)

Andy is a freshman. Andy is frustrated. It’s New Year’s Eve and he is lying next to Mindy. She can’t understand and he can’t understand. All he wants is two minutes of his penis in her vagina and all she wants is a night in his arms.

He feels millions of years of singular purpose throbbing between his legs and Mindy remembers the day she saw a television commercial asking her if she was interested in her family history. She was. She found her great-grandmother was a product of rape.

Andy doesn’t think much of New Year’s resolutions but Mindy wants to go over her list again so he makes sure they’re not touching in the bed and pretends not to listen.

She begins but he’s thinking about sex again. How he’s earned it. He puts up with all the ‘Dork & Mindy’ comments from her friends. When he found out that she was actually named after the Pam Dawber character he thought about ending it right there but he didn’t.

She wants to look forward to the next day more than she misses the one that preceded it. He suggests that perhaps she should pick a favorite smell and train herself to be able to smell it whenever she wants. She doesn’t understand the connection but he insists that it would help a great deal if she knew that going forward she could close her eyes and recall a smell any time she wanted.

She never wants to like a place that she’s been better than a place that she hopes to one day go. He suggests that perhaps she should pick a favorite song and train herself to be able to hear it whenever she wants.

She moves against him and he retreats, anxious that she doesn’t get the satisfaction of feeling his hardness pressing against her.

He stares at the ceiling in the dark and the sound of her voice makes him realize that there are people that you will always forgive no matter what they do to you and there are people that you’ll look for any opportunity to cut loose.

His penis reminds him with a subtle urgency that its sole purpose is to spread his DNA. Of all the thoughts in his head it is the oldest and he should consider it his prime directive. He tries again to ignore his penis.

He interrupts her next resolution to remind her that he thinks resolutions are for the weak. She continues after noting she can see his weakness poking up against the sheet.

He rolls onto his side facing her.

He stares at the wall in the dark and the sound of her voice makes him realize that there are people that make you who you are, even if you’ve never met them, and there are people that flow over and around you even though you see them every day.

She stretches and he can see her toes poke out from under the sheets. Although not much of a foot fan he has to appreciate how cute they look.

“I think that your face is the carpet and your subconscious is like the padding underneath it” she offers in a lazy voice. “You can clean the carpet but all the beer and wine you spill stays in the padding. Lurking.”

“Is that from your philosophy course?” he inquires.

“Nope. Just came to me.”

“So all of life is just accumulating hidden stains?”

“In the end… maybe.” She frowns.

Then continues.

“I knew this girl. She met this guy and he had the worst breath she’d ever smelled. She told me that it was as if he’d just eaten a tray of onion rings. They ended up dating for a year and it turns out that his breath never got better. Halitosis or some shit. Eventually she grew to think of it as a quirk. They ended up breaking up and it broke her heart. She always thought that he might have been the one.”

She paused as if digesting her own story.

“After that she would always cry when she was slicing onions.”

He laughed and suggested that everyone cries when they slice onions.

“Yeah, but not like she did.”

He felt like she was waiting for him to say something profound.

“Do you think we’re in love?”

It was the best he could come up with.

“I hope not. I always thought there would be more to it.” She said it without a trace of disappointment or animosity, merely stating how she felt and he took it at face value.

“Agreed.”

Silence stretched out and made itself comfortable.

There are people that you love and when you lose them you are never the same. You miss them every day and curse yourself for letting them go. They were both too stupid to understand it at the time. Later they would spend hours alone wishing to be that stupid again.

It’s sometimes difficult to appreciate a moment.

Especially with a hard-on on New Year’s Eve.