I’m twenty-five years old, an age I like to call: The Year of Convenient Crisis. It’s something that everyone at the age of twenty-five goes through yet it is not synonymous to a single problem. I’ve seen the crises come in the form of weight gain, financial debt, spiritual reevaluation, political party changes and even something as simple as realizing the light turns off in the fridge when you close it. It does.
However, my crisis came from looking at the overwhelming amount of pictures on my social media during the month of February. A wonderful mixture of Malcolm X quotes and couples showing their unconditional love to the populace of their friends list. Yes, my crisis was the absence of love; to be more precise, the wanting of love.
As the days went by and February turned to March and March to December I found myself on an expedition for love which, in only a short amount of time, resulted in a list of failures filled with random sexual encounters and a premium Tinder account hoarding hundreds of matches but only three messages. Hope was absent but the fear of being alone was there to push me to continue my search. Oh, and of course it helped my writing. For what better muse is there than loneliness?
While I continued this search for love I made the conscious decision, yes conscious meaning that I meant to torture myself, to become a waiter at my local diner. I went from being the writer with his Macbook and a black coffee at the corner table working on a screenplay, to serving the writer with their Macbook and a black coffee at the corner table working on a screenplay. I was now almost fully on my way to becoming the perfect cliche for a perfect love story.
All I was missing were the daydreams. The slow motion moments that filled your head with violin strings and fuzzy rose colored boarders. This was until I finally saw her. The perfect her. She, along with the daydreams, came in the form of a twenty-four-year-old Puerto Rican woman by the name of Isabella De La Cruz, a regular at my diner and a writer. How perfect that she’d be the first. Thanks to her I was now able to look at any girl and imagine what our lives would be like together.
So today I imagined life with Isabella.
Today’s vivid imagination started off like most of my RomCom stories do. I go to the local library and unknowingly, Isabella and I are searching for the same book. We both reach for it from opposite sides of a bookshelf, unknowingly trying to tug it from one another until we realize there’s someone on the other end. We both laugh and practice common courtesy. Eventually, I jokingly tell her to keep the book in exchange for her number and a coffee date. She likes coffee, she agrees. Also, this is a daydream so it’d be depressing if she didn’t.
This date leads to a series of other dates, but at nice places like — The Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Outback. She likes stealing the steak knives. I need more forks in my apartment. An avant-garde Bonnie and Clyde.
As our many conversations of dry humor start to become trivial, the divulging of secrets and insecurities come to a head. These questions lead to vulnerability and a chance to show one another that we can be trusted and manipulated. This of course ends in sex.
The sex isn’t great at first but it gets better every time we do it. She goes down on me without me asking; she likes it. She even teaches me the proper way to eat pussy.
The better the sex gets, the deeper the talks after are. The deeper the talks, the closer we get to the million dollar question: What are we?
I meet her parents; they are very much parents. Her dad’s the owner of a bodega chain and her mom is a nurse. They’ve been married for 36 years and managed to raise 4 kids and all of them have gone to college pursue lucrative careers.
High expectations.
Several times throughout the dinner they ask about Isabella’s writing and soon after propose that they have friends that can get her a real job.
She doesn’t budge, at least I don’t think she does. But her face is stern, her resolve seems sterner.
We have days where we’re deeply in love and others when we can’t be bother to be perceived let alone fight. Seeing my socks anywhere other than the hamper triggers her much like finding her Tom Ford Ruby Rush Lip Color Matte all over the bathroom sink triggers me. But seeing her smile is like much watching the sunrise and when I come up with a breakthrough for my screenplay she’s more excited than I am.
But one day, a day like any other of minor significance, she tells me that she quit her blogging job at a start-up called Naked Fiction and has instead found a position at her mother’s hospital. She’s also going back to school for medicine. I had no idea she cared for medicine and that her mother had maintained this hold on her.
It was then that the sounds of her typing, the clanking of a wine glass on a bottle, and the deep sighs of frustration that penetrated the worn walls of our two-bedroom apartment in the middle of the night, had slowly began to fade into what would be distant memories of ‘When I first met your mother she used to…’.
Dating leads to marriage. By this time she has a nursing position at the hospital much like her mom and plans to become a doctor. The first couple years are normal, the sex is still decent…for a married couple,and we have a kid on the way. The idea of a child scares me and I finally take a good look at myself and the stack of screenplays I’ve yet to sell. For the first time I am in the same position that Isabella found herself in a few years ago: faced with a decision between dreams and economic comfort.
I get a new, higher paying job. Anything is more than nothing. I’m in sales. It doesn’t really matter what the product is but I sell it anyway. Isabella sees how unhappy I am and urges me to still write while I work. I feel the emptiness in her motivation and the hollowness of her words but I do it anyway. Eventually I find my stride again and decide to once more pursue my dream of being a writer; Isabella doesn’t like this.
Writing doesn’t bring home real money, she tells me.
You sound like your mother, I tell her.
Two more years pass and we’ve had 3 break ups, 42 arguments, another kid, a discussion about a devil’s threesome as well as 0 picked up screenplays. I thought I got better. I didn’t, so I go back to sales.
Within the next ten years we’ve come to a mutual understanding that sex is a rare occurrence like solar eclipses and we’re in this for the kids even though the kids don’t really care. It’s rare that they care about too much of anything; they’re lucky like that. The real reason we’re together is because both of us have gotten fat and accustomed to life. Fat and Accustomed to life.
Knowing this might be my future, knowing this is just a vivid imagination with no basis or real relevance, and wondering how things ended up or would end up the way they did, I approach said Isabella De La Cruz. She smiles at me. A smile that she could give me a few years from now. A smile that could disappear in a decade.
I tell her, “We’d be terrible together in the end but before that happens we could make a really nice story.”
It isn’t the best pick up line.
She closes her laptop and gives me a once over…then it becomes a twice over and she says, “I could see that.