If a cow ever got the chance...

People at work keep asking me how the vacation was and I have even less to say than usual. I wish "fine" with no qualifiers didn't mean "the-opposite-of-fine," but I guess it does. The problem is, as Outgrabe (who I miss terribly) pointed out, they want to hear stories about quaint chocolate shops, or romantic walks on the beach, and not much of that was happening.

C and I fought. A lot. Not the kind of fighting where you realize right away how much you love the other person and there's make-up sex and it brings you closer and all that. This was the kind of fight where you just bicker, back and forth, like people who dislike each other but are too tired to get out of the room. Worse than siblings, because no referee. Plus (and you'd think I'd have inferred this sometime in the past six years), we have totally different vacationing styles. The older I get, the more I become exactly like my parents--the people who get up at 5 a.m. and feel that a vacation is wasted if you don't visit every museum and hiking trail within a 50-mile radius and immerse yourself completely in the local culture. (Previous family vacations have included trips to the National Museum of Iron [which was actually pretty cool] and a veterinarian's office in Chadron, Nebraska [no, there were no pets on vacation with us; I forget now why we went there].) None of this would be such a problem if I hadn't also picked up my parents' sense of innate superiority, which is SO innate that I don't even think they realize they have it--the idea that being better educated makes you better--that people who use their vacations to actually relax are lazy and boring. So guess what C likes to do? Yep, I'm making lists of the five best hiking trails in Copper Harbor and walking down to the lake twenty times a day and bugging him to go to the agate museum, and he wants to sit in the cabin with the shades drawn, rereading Ender's Game. It seems kind of funny now but it wasn't then. I said if he was going to get a cabin on Lake Superior and not go down to the beach even once, he might as well have gotten a room for a week at the Days Inn Airport. He said it was a totally different atmosphere, that he was relaxing, that I was the one who would take bad memories home with me because I couldn't leave my mental activity checklist behind. More words were exchanged.

Now I'm reading this over and it's unfair to him. There were numerous good times as well, which is how it always is, no matter where we go. Like when Interstate 41 became an unpaved red-dirt road and we followed it for ten miles trying to get to the end. Or eating the best gnocchi of our lives in a room hung with Christmas lights in a little town miles from anywhere. Or the beach with the beautiful rounded granite stones (yeah, we did finally get to the beach).

Mostly I just remember myself being high-maintenance. Nagging a lot. Trying to force things. Manifesting my various phobias. C was how he always is--gentle, passive, stubborn, methodical. He can be really loving, but not when I'm trying to drag him somewhere or pound him into submission or impose on him my little plans for his life.

I've been thinking about this a lot--especially once we got back, when it became clearer somehow. We can't move in together. In fact, we should probably break up. I need to get more independence. I need to stop trying to make him the perfect romantic boyfriend even though I know he looks at a rose bouquet and sees twenty dollars wasted. I need to stop picturing our gorgeous (although chunky) halfbreed Mayan children. In short, I need to stop being such a dick.

We could be the best friends ever. We used to be. The kind, as he put it, where you meet up after grade school and talk all about your day and have a cookie (except now, it's more likely a Manhattan). The romance thing was always sort of grafted on... There's trust; I even think there's unconditional love. It wasn't until I decided he was going to be my Total Life Partner that all these problems began.

So we're hanging out on Thursday and there will be no little bombshells dropped; he knows all of this, everything I just wrote down here. Okay, actually just the bad stuff about how I don't like him, I may have to remedy that. More later, but probably on a different topic, I kind of want to write less about relationships and how very important and self-absorbed I am. Instead, I'll write more about food! Yeah.

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