I was wrong. Again.

At 8:15 Friday night it was all over, but it started six hours earlier.

I sat curled up in my sheets, drinking a smoothie and texting my friend, the Mexican, about the going away party him and others were throwing for me that day.  My phone beeped and I thought it was the Mexican getting back to me about the slip and slide idea, but I noticed it was a number that had no name attached to it.  However, the arrangement of numbers formed a number I recognized, name or no name.

“Are you still going on your farewell tour?” questioned the blinking phone.

“What?”

“I thought you were saying goodbye to people,” the phone remarked.

“I am. Would you like to be added to the list?”

“Maybe. Don’t know,” said the phone matter of factly. A response that made me question the point of texting me in the first place.

“Well, you have 12 hours to figure out whether or not I’m worth saying goodbye to.”

With that, I threw the sheets off of me, grabbed my stuff and headed over to the Mexican and Seamstress’ house for a day of slip and sliding, drinking and a taco eating contest.

Sufficiently covered in mud and soapy water thirty minutes later,  I was sent inside the Mexican’s house to get more beer.  I looked to the coffee table and saw my phone blinking again. I wiped the soap off of my hand and picked it up.

“Are we going to say goodbye the only way we know how?” the phone inquired.

“I’ll think about it. Are you going to be nice?”

“Yes,” said the horny phone.

Before I could entertain the idea, the phone interrupted me.

“Now?”

“Can’t. I’m at a slip and slide party.”

“Ok. Later then?” the phone replied.

“Alright, but I have a taco eating contest to go to first. It will have to be around seven.”

With that the phone and I agreed. That gave me three hours to finish slip and sliding, go home to shower, return and eat as many tacos as I possibly could and head over to the chirping phone’s house.

After being freshly showered, having a losing score of nine tacos, and playing three rounds of beer pong, I was on my way down the streets that I would never drive down again. Kings of Leon blared out my windows and the rain started to fall. It was a short, intermittent summer kind of rain–there was no need to roll up the windows on this  five minute drive. I pulled into the long, gravel driveway and parked my car next to his.  And this was it.

All that anger that had accumulated over the years, and far more recently, what was I going to do with it? I climbed the stairs. The stairs I picked up shattered key fob pieces off of late one night.  I opened the door.  The door that was half opened that one time I barged in one particularly cold January night when I was on an angry hunt for the boy who left me standing by myself. I saw him sitting there on the couch.  The couch that we had hooked up on many times before in his old house.

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

The phone was silent, not blinking in protest anymore. BP sat before me and this was the end.

He had mentioned earlier that he did not have any condoms and I had told him to go to the store before I had gotten there, but he hadn’t gone.  He offered the idea of not having sex, just everything else, but I shook my head. He ran quickly to the convenience store down the street, while I watched The Perfect Storm and thought to myself how terrible the special effects were. He returned shortly with condoms in one hand and a case of Busch Light in the other. I couldn’t help but comment on his shitty taste in beer.

He changed the TV to the alternative music channel and Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire was playing.

“I always wanted to have sex to this song.”

“Well then com’on,” he said.

We went to his bedroom and for the first time in a long time, it was awkward–to me at least. He seemed indifferent. He asked if I had worn boyshorts, which I usually do if I know I’m hanging out with him.

“No, I already packed all my underwear, so instead I have none.”

“Fair enough.”

And from there it was short and in my opinion did no justice to a two year fuck buddy relationship, but I guess I can’t be picky. I climbed off and positioned myself perfectly under his spinning ceiling fan. We laid amongst the sweaty sheets, quite reminiscent of the previous summer when we sweated the day away in his electricity-less house.  He told me of his future plans and me of mine. Then we got to talking about funny movies and he and I have two very different views of what is considered funny. He spout off an argument for his type of movies and I countered it.

“Let us not forget the fact that I hate an actor that you absolutely love and think is funny.”

“Who?”

“If I told you, which I already have in the past, you would kick me out,” and with that I got up to go to the bathroom.  When I returned all my clothes were laid out before me on the bed.

“Oh. How nice of you.  You remembered, didn’t you?”

“I think so.”

I started putting on my clothes, while he probed me for the answer.  I hestitated and lied.  “Bill Paxton.”

“Why did I care that you hate Bill Paxton?”

“I don’t know, but I also hate Jim Carrey and Nicholas Cage.”

I grabbed my sunglasses, “and by the way, we’re not doing it this way. You’re not going to be an asshole and kick me out, like last time when you asked me, ‘why are you here?’”

He fed me some bullshit on how he learned from Dane Cook and I couldn’t help but comment on his shitty taste in comedians.

I stood up and walked out of his bedroom.  Incubus played from the TV, a band we both always agreed on.  I told him I lied about who the actor was, he questioned me again.  I put on my flip flops, the same ones I wore when running down the street from his old house with friends while we tried to catch the last bus home. I picked up my purse and made my way to the door. We stood motionless, saying our final goodbyes.  We had infact hadn’t actually been that outright mean to each other this time, but we had thrown in our own snide remarks–ones that bled the evidence that we had simply used each other for two years and that it was nothing more. And now there was nothing more to say. We wished each other luck in life and kissed each other goodbye. I twisted the door knob.

“Will Ferrell”

“I knew it!” he yelled as he jokingly pushed me out the door and slammed it.

He opened the door and yelled to me as I walked down the sidewalk about my feelings on a particular show. I told him it was a great show, the Photographer worked on the set of it, then smiled and waved.

I stepped back into my car, Kings of Leon’s Be Somebody was in it’s final verse..Now is your time and you know where you stand, With a gun in your hand, with a gun in your hand. Now I’m no longer an ordinary man. Was this your big plan, your gun in your hand? And I say you can’t get enough. No, you can’t get enough. The rain had stopped while we were inside, but as I put the car in reverse it started again–but it was a short, intermittent summer kind of rain.  No need to roll the windows up.

———————–

I liked that ending, but it doesnt close up everything as well as the actual night did.  That night made it evident that even in between all the bullshit and strange anger we have for each other, there was some semblance of very base level friendship.  Albeit very little, as most of it has disintergrated over time, you could tell at one point we were “friends.”  And while it may sound strange, after leaving his house, I felt like I could leave Greenville.  Before that point, I had a very unfinished feeling looming over my head. I came home much, much later that night and talked to Amaya for a bit, telling her of the final goodbye. She had nothing but bad things to say about him, but suddenly it no longer mattered. It was over and it was done and I was completely ambivalent towards the entire subject. Three days have now passed (which actually feels like MUCH longer) and while I’m not as ambivalent as I was, I still totally recognize that he was an A Class Douchebag with a drinking problem, but that he no longer deserves the energy or thought. And so finally, FINALLY, I can say that THAT is THAT and is done. And I’m so unbelievably happy.  It was horribly saddening three days ago. Not the fact that “it” was over, but the ending of  “it” solidified the ending of college.  But God, it was unhealthy and we’d be both better people if we never saw each other again. So goodbye BP once and for all. Old stories on him might resurface when I’m out of new things to write, but I know nothing new about him will ever appear again.