I Told You So

 

Photo by ArrImAPirate (that's me!)

The door slammed and I counted. One, two three steps across the hollow wooden landing, five down the first flight of stairs, and five more down the second. It should have been six, but the last step was concrete and didn’t make a sound when size thirteen shoes stomped down in anger.

Next was the car door, another slam. He must've really been made because he babied that car. A second later the engine roared to life, and with a squeal of the tires he was gone. Part of me thought he would just circle the building and come back, but a few minutes later the only sound I heard was the chirping of the birds singing summer’s song, and I knew he wouldn’t. Not for a while at least.

Okay, so I had to know though. For when he got back. I had to prove I was right. I sprung up from my moon and star blanket draped futon and strode across the tiny living room of our brand-new apartment, and into the bedroom, where the computer sat on a thrifted flat pack desk, shoved in the corner. I shimmied around the bed and slid into the dining room chair that had been repurposed as a computer chair. It didn’t matter, my dining table only had space enough for two. And for those that are counting, that meant I still had one extra dining room chair. It sat on the front porch, next to the camping chair that had a rip in it’s nylon seat. The same front porch he had just stomped across to leave after our first big fight. The same front porch we had been enjoying every balmy Colorado summer evening for the first week after we’d moved into our first apartment together.

I wondered if we’d be sitting out there again tonight, sipping our sun tea and laughing about this incident. Oh, or maybe he would get one of his friends to buy a six pack of beer for us. Maybe that's what he was out doing, as a peace offering. I wondered when he would come back.

I shrugged away the thought, turned on the monitor, and waited for the computer screen to flicker to life. After it did it lit up the dark cave of our bedroom, and I clicked the icon for Internet Explorer. I was so glad the apartment had Ethernet, and I didn’t have to wait for the computer to dial up to get online. Next, I typed: https://www.askjeeves.com. The familiar yellow screen loaded, and I entered my question “Is the Great Wall of China the only man made object you can see from outer space?”

I clicked on the first website, read a few sentences, and shit, I pressed the back button and went to the next website, then the next, and the next. Well fuck, they all said the same thing!

With a sigh, I closed the web browser, turned off the computer screen, and slunk back to the futon to wait for him to return. I couldn’t believe it, our first real fight, and I was wrong.