Tag Archives: wife

Everything was different

I walked through the door and everything was different. “Hi honey,” it sounded like my wife, but it it’s my wife. Everything is different, including her. Her hair is falling in a way not like it usually does, like, maybe more to the left? I don’t know, I can’t really articulate it, but this is all just slightly off, I’m looking at her, and it’s not right.

And her shirt, I’ve definitely seen that t-shirt before, it’s one of mine, or a pretty close facsimile of a shirt that I’d received like ten years ago at college, at some club, or one of the club fairs, one of the student groups was giving out free t-shirts to people that signed up for their email list. I’d never worn it, I think it was an XL, but my wife always wears these old oversized t-shirts around the house. Not this one though, it was … was the lettering off? I couldn’t tell if my shirt, like my real shirt, if there wasn’t maybe a hole under the left arm.

But it was definitely different. “What’s wrong?” this lady asks me, and I didn’t want to act not natural, in case whoever set this whole thing up was maybe looking for me to act all convinced. But I didn’t know what to say, it was like trying to smile a natural smile for a photograph, but you can’t fake it, you’re really trying but it looks crooked, I felt like any words that would have come out of my mouth right now would have been the same, it would have been a crooked giveaway. And this dog came up to me, again, it couldn’t have been my dog. They’re about the same size, yes, but the way my dog moves his feet when he comes over to say hi to me when I get home, it’s just, it’s not the same way, the pitter-patter pattern is … could this be like a robot?

No, just different. Is that clock on the wall, wasn’t it like five minutes behind? It’s also … it had to be. I knew that I could only look at it like a guide to the time, not as an actual indicator the current minute, but I’m looking at my watch, could this lady have fixed the clock? Or is this a completely different house? Should I walk back outside?

Or would that be too much? “I’m doing great,” I tell her, I think that sounded close enough, “You’re hungry?” I ask, hoping to draw something out of her, anything, maybe if she talks a little more I’ll be able to put my finger on exactly what’s different here. I mean, she obviously knows me. And I’m supposed to know her, right? What am I missing?

“Are you OK? You’re acting different,” she tells me. I’m acting different? Maybe that’s part of her trap. Is it too late to get out of here? “Listen, I think I dropped my wallet back at the corner, I’m going to go to check real quick,” I finish the sentence as I’m already out the door, she says something to my back but I’m gone, walking down the block, not running, I don’t want to give myself away, but definitely out.

I take out my phone to call, I don’t know who, maybe there’s an email, maybe a text message or something, some clue. But this looks different too, my phone, like the operating system got one of those really minor updates, sometimes when you wake up in the morning, you’re phone tells you that it enhanced this or tweaked that and, you can kind of tell but not really, and that’s what this was like, only I couldn’t for certain be sure as to what changes were made.

Was this my phone? Could whoever have switched around my house and my wife and my dog somehow have gotten into my pocket while I was at work? I didn’t leave this thing on my desk, had I? I don’t think so, but was I positive, was I absolutely sure? I wasn’t really sure about anything, like this block, or where I was, everything should have been the same, but nothing looked like it was supposed to look, the stores, the cars on the street, the money in my pocket, everything looked kind of off, just a little not right, everything was just different.

My biggest regret

It’s my biggest regret. And I can’t stop thinking about it. If only I hadn’t listened to my wife. Why can’t I put it behind me? That pit in the center of my stomach, the metallic taste stuck to the back of my tongue. Why did I second-guess myself? Why didn’t I follow my instincts? If only I’d ordered that second burrito, I wouldn’t be going through what I’m going through now. I wouldn’t be so hungry.

And after all of this time together, you’d think the one thing I’d be handle in our relationship is ordering food. Yet it’s always a negotiation, regardless of how hungry I say that I am, despite my insistence that I’ll be able to make room for a second entrée, it’s always this sideways glance, the, “Are you sure?”

Am I sure? I don’t know. For a minute, just a brief moment, I’m caught off guard. Maybe I’m not as hungry as I think I am. There’s a quick flashback in my head, I’m little kid again, it’s Thanksgiving and I’ve overloaded my plate with too much food to possible consume in one sitting. My grandmother scolds me for such waste, telling me that my eyes are bigger than my stomach.

Could that be the case here? No. It’s not. I rallied. I fought back. I told my wife, listen, I’ll get the chimichangas, you get flautas, and then I’m getting a burrito also, because I can handle it, because I’m starving. And yes, people use that word a little too casually, no, I wasn’t literally starving. But figuratively, my stomach was distending outward due to the lack of nourishment inside my digestive system.

“Rob,” and this is where I was at a distinct disadvantage, because where my defense, my insistence on two meals had to make a comeback, my wife stood resolute from the beginning, “Why don’t you just eat your chimichangas, and then you can finish whatever I don’t eat from my plate?”

And yeah, I guess that’s a good point. But this was one of those rare occasions where even that might not have been enough. Even if it was, it’s not like I’d be getting a full serving of flautas, there’d be maybe half a flauta left, and of course practically the entire portion of my wife’s rice and beans. Don’t get me wrong, I love rice and beans. But I need equal amounts entrée to side dish here, I don’t want just bite after bite of rice and beans.

Ideally, if I were out by myself, table for one please, I would’ve gone for both entrees without looking back. So that was the loudest voice screaming in my head, get the burrito, nobody tells you not to order the burrito, nobody tells you anything. Yeah, here it was, my third wind, I was just going to ignore everything until the waitress came over and I’d blurt it out, chimichangas and the burrito please, and then I’d cover my ears and close my eyes and not respond to any external stimuli until the food hit the table.

But I didn’t get the chance. My wife was still looking at me. I was on my third wind, yeah, it was strong, but she was still riding that first wind, she hadn’t budged at all. “Rob,” she said again, and I wanted to cover my ears right there, but she had me, “Just get the chimchangas, and I’m not going to eat all of mine. You don’t need another whole burrito. Flautas are like mini burritos anyway. You’ll be fine.”

And beside the fact that flautas are nothing at all like mini burritos, despite that voice, something inside of me warning that I wouldn’t be fine, that this nagging sense of being way too hungry was going to follow me out of the restaurant, accompany me to bed, for some reason I gave in. I waited for a super strong fourth wind to blow in and provide some irrefutable attack, but there was nothing, the waitress came over to the table.

“Can I start you guys off with anything?” I looked to my wife, “Guacamole?” I mouthed to her? And she didn’t have to open her mouth, her head was almost imperceptibly moving from side to side, she communicated with her eyes, “Rob, we already have chips on the table.”

The food came, I housed my chimichangas, I polished off all of the chips and salsa, and I waited for my wife to finish her food so we could trade plates. It was just as I had suspected. There was maybe three-quarters of a flauta left, along with basically the entire portion of rice and beans, and of course that little garnish of shredded iceberg lettuce.

What really killed me was, my wife got to hang onto my plate in front of her, like a trophy she hadn’t really earned. This thing was spotless. Talk about the clean plate club, I was practically club president that night. Everything was gone, rice, beans, garnishes, I could just imagine the dishwasher looking at this plate and wondering, who did such a great job? I’d better show the cook. And he would, he’d show the cook, they’d all be overwhelmed with a sense of pride, wow, this guy really loved our chimichangas, really appreciated our authentic cuisine.

And now all of that work was credited to my wife. Meanwhile, I had this plate of basically scraps in front of me. Like I said before, I want each bite of a meal to be in a proportion, a little bit of entrée, some rice, a few beans, maybe a sliver of lettuce. That’s how you polish a plate clean. You can’t just eat plain rice. I mean, you can, but it’s not fun. That’s not why you go out to a restaurant.

And so there were a few leftovers on the plate when the busboy came to clear the table. He automatically took my clean plate away from my wife, but he paused to me, “You finished?” I wanted to be like, you don’t understand, that wasn’t my plate, that was my wife’s. I ate a lot. I ate mine and then most of hers. Seriously.

But he didn’t care. And worst of all, I was totally still hungry. It wasn’t right away, but pretty soon after we got home, I realized that I actually wanted that burrito still. Why didn’t I trust myself? Who knows my appetite better than me? Nobody. From now on, I’m never listening to anybody at a restaurant ever again. Because man, that burrito, the one that got away. It would have been the crown jewel to a perfect meal. But now I’ll never know the satisfaction that would have come from having gone from super hungry to ultimately satiated. It’s my biggest regret. I should have ordered that burrito.

I tried to control a swarm of bees

I saw this clip on Reddit of a guy approaching a whole swarm of bees attached to a tree. He slowly puts his hand through the mass of squirming insects and removes it a few seconds later, totally unharmed. The next time, he goes back in, he pulls off a huge of bees, almost like the whole cluster was a liquid, like he was running his hands through a loosely cohesive whole.

Scrolling down through the comments, I hoped to find some sort of an explanation. And I found it. Someone wrote about how when you find bees attached to a tree or some other object, it means that they’re swarming, that they don’t have a queen to protect, and that they’re incredible docile. It all made sense as far as I could tell, I mean, I’m no beekeeper, but this was proof, right?

So when my wife called me outside a few months later, she was screaming, “Rob! Come outside, come quick!” I went out back and she was standing twenty feet away from the garage. “Look Rob, there’s some sort of a beehive.” And it was just like I saw on the video, there were tons of them, all clustered in the top left corner.

I said to my wife, “You want to see something cool?” and I was just going do it, like I’d run my hands through and my wife would be all scared but after a while she’d see that I wasn’t being hurt. How would she react? She’d probably start asking a bunch of half-questions, like, “But … how? This … what?” and I’d just laugh, making up some nonsense answer like, “It’s all about confidence. These bees are more afraid of you than you are of them. You need to project strong vibes, and they’ll understand that. They don’t speak English, but body language a universal means of communication.”

So I calmly walked toward the hive. “Rob? What are you doing, Rob?” to which I replied, “Hey, I’ve got it. Don’t worry.” And that whole confidence, posture, body language thing, it totally worked on my wife. She saw me chill out, she started chilling out herself. “All right, just be careful. What are you going to do?”

“Watch,” and, you know, even though I was fairly certain that this was going to go just as it did on the Internet, there was still a palpable sense of fear. I mean, even if you’re positive that something doesn’t pose a real threat, a swarm of bees is still pretty scary. I’m not even used to dealing with like one bee, but this? This was hundreds of bees. I got close and the buzzing, which I could hear from back at the house, it grew louder, deafening, I could feel it like a cloud of vibration surrounding the periphery of my being.

I raised my hand toward the swarm and I realized that I was fighting my bodily instincts. It was same feeling I had when I went to this adventure park over the summer. One of the attractions was called the Mega Jump, basically, you climb up to a really high platform, they attach you to this rope and pulley thing, and you jump off, confident that whatever it is they’ve tied you to will slow your descent before you touch ground. Again, even though I knew it was this controlled thing, I still experienced a very physical reaction, a terror really, as soon as I stepped up to the edge.

But this was all in my head, I told myself, and I knew that I couldn’t stand there hesitating for too long. I’d psych myself out, or worse, my wife might get the impression that I didn’t know what I was doing, she might get hysterical again and I’d back out if only to keep her from freaking out. I swallowed the lump down my throat and I reached into the mass.

And the stinging was immediate. I recoiled my hand instantly, it was covered in bees, they were all stinging me. The outer layer of the swarm broke off and started circling my body, my face. I wanted to swat them away, I instinctively started flailing around, hitting myself in the head, which, with my one hand still covered in bees, it was just spreading them to my head, my scalp, the ones that had already stung me and died, it was like they were glued on, and I crushed some of them against my skull.

My wife came over with a bucket of water and doused me, but it did little good. In a brief lapse in between bouts of panic and terror, I regained control of my faculties and ran toward the hose, sprayed as many of them as I could away from my body, and followed my wife who had escaped inside the house.

There were like ten or twelve bees that had made it inside, and right outside, it was just this cloud, a whole nest of angry pissed off bees looking for some revenge. My hand was bleeding, everything was starting to swell, my wife was swatting at the few intruders were still circling our heads trying to exact revenge. I looked at my ballooning hand, she looked at me, she said, “What the fuck Rob? What the fuck?”

I’ll eat whatever for dinner, just order anything

I get so indecisive sometimes, I can’t make up my mind about anything, even the simplest of decisions, like last night, my wife and I are trying to figure out dinner, she’s like, “What do you want?” and I’m like, “I don’t know, anything’s good I guess, whatever you want,” and she says, “Sushi?” and I’m like, “Sushi? Didn’t we just have sushi last week?” and I’m like, “Yeah, I guess, but it feels like we just had it,” and she says, “Yeah, well you had pizza for lunch and dinner yesterday, why can’t we have sushi separated by a whole week?”

And I can already tell that I’ve f’ed up, me being the one telling her we could order “whatever, anything she wanted,” but she doesn’t bring it up right away, I know she will, eventually, if I can’t decide on something, but she suggests, “Indian?” and I don’t know, I kind of just stare off into space, like thinking it over in my head, but it’s not even that I don’t want Indian, it’s that I don’t have any feelings for it whatsoever, like her saying the word Indian registered in my head, I heard her say it, but it didn’t spark anything inside me, neither good nor bad, and so I couldn’t respond with anything, I could only continue to stare, to zone out, maybe if I just completely ignored it she’d suggest something else.

“Rob? Indian?” and I need to respond, the best I can get out is, “Eh. I don’t know,” and now I know it’s coming, she’s going to get fed up, I’d be fed up, if I asked her what she wanted for dinner, and she pushed all onus of responsibility my way, of course I’d get a little annoyed if she started vetoing all of my decisions.

But I can’t commit. Do I want Indian? I don’t think so. Even sushi wouldn’t have been terrible, but I had already issued a complaint, she interrupts my thought process, “OK, so no sushi, no Indian,” and here would have been a good time to let her in on what was going through my head, “Well,” I could have been like, “It’s not like I couldn’t eat sushi,” but I thought better of it, we were already too far into this that if I had backtracked on the sushi, that would have been it, sushi for dinner.

“Mexican?” and I love Mexican, but the Mexican place by us is so heavy, so at least I have something to say here, I tell her, “That Mexican place is so heavy …” and she rolls her eyes, I don’t want to put off her suggestion entirely, so I add, “But I like it. It’s a great Mexican place. Just really heavy. Do you really feel like eating something so heavy?” and again, I think I got too busy defending my initial reaction, because sure Mexican is heavy, but now that I thought about it, I wouldn’t mind eating something heavy.

“Actually, Mexican sounds pretty good,” but she’s already been swayed by my comment, “No, you’re right, I don’t really feel like eating anything that heavy,” which is my own fault, I set myself up for that one. But now I couldn’t get the taste of those tacos out of my head, “But what about those chorizo nachos?” I try to tempt her, and she pauses, but I can tell it’s going to be dismissed, “No, maybe next time. What about falafel?”

And now we’re swinging the other way, all because of my heavy comment. Note to self: unless I’m really set on not eating something for dinner, don’t describe it as heavy. I like falafel, but, “Honey, that’s not really a dinner,” which, I don’t even know what that means, but it’s the best I could have come up with without giving her a minute to collect her thoughts, a desperate move on my part to try and avoid what I knew was coming next, an exasperated, “OK, so you tell me that you’ll eat anything, that it’s whatever I choose, right?”

There it is. “Right,” I tell her, “So let’s just get Mexican, you said it, obviously because you want it, right? You want it, I want it, let’s get Mexican,” and there’s a pause, I think that she’s considering it, but I’m mistaken, that face isn’t one of consideration, it’s one of apprehension, “But,” and I know it’s not going to happen, “It’s just so … heavy.”

And then I think, well, sushi wouldn’t be terrible, I could eat sushi. So I go, “You know what? Let’s just have sushi. You wanted sushi, so let’s get it,” and she’s like, “Are you sure?” and I should just be a grown up here and be happy with the fact that after all of my indecisiveness we’ve actually come to an agreement, but I can’t help myself, there are selfess points to be earned here, I could use this in the future, I say, “Well, I mean, I’ll get it … if that’s what you want. I can eat sushi,” and she looks at me and smiles and says, “Thanks hun,” and I’m like, “No problem. I’m a nice guy.”

This is my parking spot

So what, we’re going to stand here all day and argue over who saw this spot first? I saw it first. I’m going head in. Come on man, are we really going to do this? Don’t you think this is probably like the most cliché thing that we could be doing in this parking lot? Because look, I’m not a doormat, all right? I’m not just going to back away. And I get it, you know, I’m not claiming to be the best driver, but I’m a lot better than I was before. I don’t cut people off on the exit ramps, I wait in line. Some people cut right to the front? What am I going to do?

But that’s on the highway. This is a parking lot, and I was absolutely here first. Listen ma’am, this is between your husband and me, OK? So why don’t you just lean your body back inside the car window and stop screaming at me, because you’re not helping. No, you’re making it worse. You’re making me feel like more of a doormat, like you think I’m going to back down just because you’re loud and pissed off?

No, I’m not going to be intimidated. What? Sister, whatever, wife, I don’t know. Just, sir, tell her to get back inside. No, I’m not telling you what to do, well … well I guess yeah, I am telling you what to do. Have your sister shut the fuck up for a second … OK, yeah, that wasn’t right, sorry for cursing at you. Ma’am, yes … OK … ma’am … right, I apologized. I’m sorry for saying fuck. But you see how agitated you’re making me?

Will you stop screaming for one second? Can I get one word in here? Yeah well I apologized for saying fuck, I didn’t apologize for the parking space because, why would I apologize? I had my blinker on as the car before was pulling out. Well it doesn’t matter if you saw me or not, because I was here, and that’s the way you park in a parking lot. You know how long I’ve been looking for a spot? A long time. I’ve been circling and circling like an idiot for like twenty minutes now, Jesus, the amount of time I’ve spent in this parking lot is like double how long it would have taken me if I’d just walked.

Honey, get in the car, honey, you’re not helping. Please, just sit down, please, will you let me handle this? Will you? Hey! Don’t talk to my wife that way! Yeah, well, that’s true, I was a little short with your wife … sister, sorry, right? Anybody ever tell you two you look like husband and wife? That’s not what I meant, it’s just, you know, you don’t really look like brother and sister. Is one of you two adopted?

See? I told you, I could tell. What are you, Italian? And you? All right, OK, I’m just saying, I knew it, you didn’t have to act so offended when I mistook you for husband and wife, you guys must get it all the time. Well, yeah, I guess I’d be annoyed if I was constantly getting mistaken for my sister’s husband.

Hey come on man, how long are we going to keep this up? Because … oh yeah? Well I’m not moving either. That’s what I was just going to say, I was going to be like, because I’m not moving. And I’m not moving. Here you go honey, take the keys, I’ll meet you inside. Fine, well, if this guy doesn’t want to move, I’ll just wait out here, you go eat dinner by yourself, just get me some takeout or something when you leave. I don’t know, order me anything. Just get me anything. Jesus Christ, fucking anything on the menu.

Sorry. I didn’t mean to curse at you. No, I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at this guy. Whatever, if he leaves, I’ll put it in neutral and push it in the rest of the way. Oh yeah, don’t get me any pasta, anything besides pasta. Or chicken. Just go … well, yeah, I guess I wouldn’t want to eat by myself either.

OK, go inside, get takeout, and we’ll eat here. You hear that buddy? We’re staying right here. We’re going to eat dinner right in this half of the parking spot. You want to try me? I’ll stay here all night. And that car behind you, they’re going to come back eventually, you’re going to have to move for them. I won’t budge. I’m just saying, I’ll stay here for as long as it takes. How you feeling? You need to go to the bathroom? Not me. I’m OK for at least twelve more hours.