Green Grass
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
“That’s the thing. I just don’t know. I’m waiting for something, but I don’t know what it is. I only know that it awaits me.” His eye contact vacillated between his coffee cup and his fork.
“Well, what kind of thing is it?” She asked.
He didn’t want to keep talking in circles, but he also didn’t want to give her a false answer, just to get off the current subject, so he paused, shut his eyes, and rubbed his temples. When he reopened his eyes, nothing had changed. She was still patiently awaiting his answer, giving him all of her attention.
“I just don’t know.” He said. “I already told you, I’m always impatient, because I’m waiting for something, but try as I might, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what it is that I’m waiting for.”
She smiled a nervous smile, and blushed. She was so amicable and attractive that it pained him to see her struggling to understand him. “I don’t understand why you can’t be happy where you are?”
This was the much-anticipated question that he had tried so desperately to avoid. It crushed him even worse in reality than it had all the times he’d envisioned it in his mind. What was Peter thinking? Here he was, talking to his girlfriend about how unhappy he was, but he wasn’t able to pinpoint anything helpful. Why had he even bothered to attempt this conversation with her? Oh yeah, it was because he loved her more than anything else in the world, and trusted her more than anyone else as well.
Peter felt his eyes straining, and knew that if he didn’t choose his words very carefully; he was going to begin to cry. “It’s just that, well, no one is like me. I used to think that most people thought the way I did, and felt feelings the way that I do, but as I grow older, and get a better grip on the reality of…get a grip on the way things really are, it gets hard to realize…” He was about to cry, he knew that he was going to cry, but he forced himself to go on, he owed this much to Sarah. “It gets hard to accept the fact that I’m very alone, I’ve always been alone, and I’m always going to be alone.”
There he had done it! He had said the very words that plagued him the most. He had bared the cogs of his soul to Sarah. He was surprised to discover that he wasn’t on the verge of tears any longer.
Lumpy tears spilled down the sides of Sarah’s cheeks. All of her cheerful demeanor was now lost. Peter noticed that Sarah was so beautiful that even the saddest of tears couldn’t cut away from her natural, radiating beauty.
No one spoke. They stared at each other, trying to convey feelings without words.
Sarah wanted to tell Peter how much it hurt her to hear him say that he was alone, when he had her – all of her; everything that she could physically and mentally offer him.
Peter, on the other hand, wanted to tell Sarah that he was so sorry for being a slave to his robotic emotions, but that nothing, not even her spirit and soul could assuage the fact that he was convinced that the world was a cold, nihilistic place devoid of anything more powerful than his own consciousness.
The stalemate continued until the cheerful waitress came by to re-fill their coffee cups.
The waitress smiled at Peter, and then shot Sarah a furtive look that said, “All men are jerks, better to learn that now than later, hon.” It was amazing how successful she was in communicating this with only a slight head nod and a roll of her eyes. The waitress then casually dropped the check on the table and left without a word.
Peter flipped the check over. It listed their choices, followed by the corresponding prices, and at the bottom, underneath the total fare, the waitress had written “Merry Christmas!” and dotted the lower case “i” in Christmas with a smiley face. For some reason, this made Peter begin to cry.
“Why are you crying?” Sarah asked.
Peter nodded his head towards the check, “She wished us a Merry Christmas.”
Sarah smiled the most beautiful smile in the world. Peter had seen that smile nearly every day since he’d met her, but it never lost its novelty, because the smile was pure and genuine; her smile was a masterpiece. Michelangelo had toiled for years to create his “David”, but Sarah could smile whenever she felt happy.
“So why does that make you so unhappy, Peter?”
Peter considered the question, and concluded that he didn’t know the answer. His tears had been involuntary, he supposed. He thought about it some more, and then said, “It made me cry because she was trying to connect with us, and she failed. I cried because I couldn’t care any less about Christmas right now, because I’m so afraid of losing you that other people’s happiness frightens me. I’m crying because I’m a big baby who knows that he has what he’s supposed to want, but I cannot seem to properly appreciate what I have, and this makes me feel guilty and alone.”
Sarah waited a while, to see if Peter was going to continue. When it was clear that he had finished speaking, she reached across the table and wrapped her hand around one of his exposed fists. His hand felt abnormally cold, and he was shaking.
“Peter, you are never going to lose me, unless you make me leave you. I won’t lie, what you have said hurts, it hurts a lot, but it’s the truth, at least in so far as you can translate your true feelings into words, and that’s why I love you, because you are honest – even if it’s to a fault.”
These words made Peter shake and cry even more. Sarah continued, “I don’t know how to help you, but I do know what wouldn’t help you, and that would be for me to throw a tantrum over the fact that my boyfriend feels emotionally isolated from the world. So what? It’s a big deal – to you, but plenty of people share your pain, your frustration. Plenty of people have trouble enjoying what they have. Plenty of people cannot seem to notice just how green their very own grass is. You are not alone.”
These last words stung Peter where it hurt the most. He did feel terribly alone. He felt like an alien, so disconnected from most of humanity that he was afraid that his attitude was the first stop on the train to suicidal depression, and this frightened him more than anything else in the world.
Peter’s mind was blazing with emotions. He was considering the ramifications and permutations that could be hatched by the consequences of his jaded mindset, and these thoughts were beginning to make him feel dizzy. He realized that he wasn’t breathing at a normal rate, and when he realized this, it caused him to panic further. He tried to breathe, but realized that he had somehow forgotten how to breathe normally.
The world became rather dark. Everything in his vision began to appear two dimensionally. All of the objects in his field of vision became hazy, dark, and crisscrossed with fuzzy black lines.
Just as he was sure that he was going to pass out, Peter felt a strong squeeze on his hand, and he began to relax. His eyes regained their ability to focus, and the dizziness began to recede. His pulse lowered, his breathing resumed a regular pattern, and he realized that Sarah was holding his hand and repeating something.
Peter strained his concentration to make out the words: “You are not alone.” That was all she was saying, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, Peter believed those words. He felt their honest implications in a spot that was nowhere near his intellectual mind, and he felt overwhelmed with love, compassion, and a sense of well being.
He looked deeply into Sarah’s eyes and whispered, “Thank you. I love you. And I do not feel alone.”
These words made Sarah resume her crying. She continued to cry, only these were tears of joy, and Peter enjoyed watching her squirm as she attempted to resume control of her emotions. He took a tremendous joy in the knowledge that by looking at her honestly, and by projecting his genuine love, he could still make Sarah squirm as though they had just met. He smiled again, and Sarah blushed and returned the smile. They were still holding hands.
“I don’t deserve you.” The words leapt from his mouth without any sort of filtration process.
Sarah stopped crying, and her face grew stern and assertive. “Yes you do. You deserve everything that you have; you just take most of it for granted. But I also know that you don’t take me for granted, or else you wouldn’t have opened up to me on Christmas, at this shitty diner.”
“So, uh, where do we go from here?” Peter asked.
Sarah took a long time to answer. She released Peter’s hand and wiped her remaining tears from her cheeks and then she took a sip of her coffee.
“Where do we go from here?” She parroted. “We go somewhere, we go anywhere, I mean, we have to find something, right? That’s what you’re waiting for, something…am I right?”
Sarah became apprehensive; she worried that maybe this wasn’t the answer Peter had wanted to hear from her. She looked down at her plate and realized that she hadn’t even attempted to eat one iota of her meal.
Peter began to laugh. At first, it was a bemused chuckle, but as he looked at Sarah, and she became more and more nervous, his chuckle turned into a fit of hysterical laughter.
Peter’s laughter was the last thing in the world that Sarah had expected in response to her heartfelt pledge to assist Peter in his quest for “something,” she wasn’t even sure if his laughter was offensive, as it was so unexpected.
Peter finally quelled his own laughter, and looked gleefully into Sarah’s eyes, “No, silly, I meant literally, where do we go from here?” Peter chuckled again. “I mean, the check’s been dropped, it’s still early, and besides which, it’s Christmas, and I want to make sure that you get all the appreciation from me that you deserve!”
Without another word, Peter stood up, casually dropped a twenty dollar bill on the table, grabbed Sarah’s hand, and led her from her table to the door. She nestled her head in his neck, and realized that even though she hadn’t eaten one bite of it, this had been the best Christmas dinner of her life.
