Moments of Demerit: A Series. Worth

 moment [ moh-muhnt ]

   an indefinitely short period of time; instant:

demerit [ dih-mer-it ]

     the quality of being censurable or punishable; fault; culpability.

I’m at a coffee shop, I’m supposed to be reading research papers- but someone around me is talking about moments of impact, moments when their life shifted for the better, moments that caused them to grow into the person they are today. Their friend is talking about to opposite. The moments push us down the path to the life we live, but they didn’t cause growth… they cause us to shrink. These are the stories of those moments. The moments that made it so I hid parts of myself away and have had to find to reclaim them. These won’t be in order of time nor of the measurement of change they cause… they just are as they come out.

worth

Five months after heartbreak. I’m sitting with a boy. A boy who only texts me after 9 PM. A boy who I know only texts because he knows I’ll answer. A boy who is only associated with me because I didn’t care if he just wanted to kiss me and leave it at that. But nonetheless a boy who helped me find parts of the puzzle I’d become 5 months earlier. He was the first boy, after that day, to ask me on a real life date. The boy who “taught” me to play guitar (the truth is I already knew, but boys like to feel needed and smarter than you, so I let him “teach” me). The boy who made me gluten free cookies. The boy who called to ask me to watch the sunset. Then, he was the boy who kissed me and withdrew, discarded, forgot…. that is until 9 PM on Thursdays or Saturdays (if he didn’t have plans). The boy who made it abundantly clear I was not what he was looking for in life, but could be what he was looking for when he was bored. The boy who I’d made it abundantly clear to that I was moving and not looking for serious. He should have been a boy whose opinion and thoughts meant nothing to me, because mine obviously meant nothing to him.

That’s the boy I’m sitting with. After I’d moved. It was a Friday (that was new) and he called me (also new) at 3 o’clock (unheard of) and asked me to come visit. Said he wanted to talk to me about something. I drove 2 hours and he met me in the parking lot with a single flower (something different). Then, like every other time, we went upstairs and skimmed through movies for 30 minutes before picking one (not new). And now we were here, the movie has finished. Confused why I am here, confused why he’d called. He’d spent the entire night on the opposite side of the couch. His roommates walked by several times giving confused looks, I’d shrug in response. I look at the clock- 11:47. “I should be going” I say, “I have to drive two hours to my apartment”. His only response “Oh yeah, I forgot.” I stand to leave, slip on my shoes and place a hand on the doorknob. He’s staring at me and I’m waiting for him to remember how to talk, and what it is he wanted to talk to me about. Why I drove two hours to come watch a movie I never wanted to see. He walks over to me, hugs me for a moment. Backs away, but not completely… and pauses. 

In most stories, this would be the moment before he kissed me. In a Disney high school drama, this would be the moment he realized he wants to stay in my life or asks if he can see me again. Do I want him to ask me that? I don’t think so, our lives are on different paths, but I don’t know how else this moment would go. This isn’t a Disney movie though, this is my life. This is 2014. He pauses, looks at me and says, “I’m trying to decide if you are worth kissing.”

Not how I saw that moment going.

I fumble for words, grab my purse and jacket off the floor and say, “probably not then, eh?” He doesn’t respond as I walk out and drive two hours to get home.

I did’t hear from him for three weeks. No message to ask if I made it back, no apology, no acknowledgement that he was an asshole. Just a text, three weeks later, “I’m going to Salt Lake tonight, wanna meet me there?”

No sir, I do not. “Can’t, sorry.”

“Fine.”

I never spoke to him again.