I make bad decisions quite often. Sometimes it’s in a seemingly harmless way, like eating that extra piece of chocolate or buying a pair of shoes I didn’t need. With age, I’ve gotten better at spreading out my bad decisions between months, sometimes years.  Looking back at my past relationships, I’ve begun to see patterns in my behavior, expectations, and shortcomings.

My first girlfriend didn’t like me very much. This might be because she wasn’t actually gay or because she just didn’t care for me, I guess I’ll never know. For these reasons, I thought being in a relationship with a girl was mainly a lot of hand holding and being cheated on by your significant other. What’s worse is that I went out with this girl not once, but three times. 16-17 was obviously not an age marked by intelligence for me.

Approximately one week shy of being a senior in high school, my best friend and I threw a hotel party at the Ilikai in Waikiki to celebrate. We pooled together our money, bought tons of cheap liquor, and filled the bathtub with bags of ice from 7-11. We invited a bunch of friends, who invited other friends, and I somehow caved and invited my ex-girlfriend. 

By this time, we had already broken up twice (because she had cheated on me) and she said she might come by if she could bring a friend. My friend insisted on telling her the wrong hotel room, but I told her that the invitation didn’t seem to be met with much enthusiasm and not to worry about it.

Around midnight, I got a text from Jamie saying she was in the lobby of the hotel.  I responded with our room number and waited for the obligatory knock at the door.  She made small talk with my other friends and I watched her from across the tiny room, as if it was a surprise that she showed up.

After flirting with the majority of the guys there, she finally made her way over.  “Hey you.”

“Hey.” I was pretty drunk.

“Can we go somewhere quiet to talk?” she asked. She grabbed the nearly full bottle of tequila and tucked it under her arm. “Come on, let’s go.” She took me by the hand and took the elevator together downstairs in near silence. She swirled the tequila around, watching the li hing muis bob and race along the inside walls of the bottle. The pool area was already closed, but there were a few tables right outside the gated area.

She plopped herself down and took another swig, then reached for my hand. We made small talk while she hogged the bottle of tequila. “I still have feelings for you,” she admitted. Her hands felt clammy and nothing about this felt romantic or sincere. “I want to go out with you, but there are a few things I need.”

“Like what?” I asked. My head was pounding from the cheap Vodka and my heart was racing with anticipation.

“I still like you. I mean, I love you, but I need to be able to be with guys still.”

It felt like my brain separated itself from its stem and was spinning wildly inside my skull. I leaned back in the pool chair to steady myself, but my hand slipped through the plastic slats of the seat. “What does that even mean?”

“I want to be with you, but I need…to be able to be with a guy sometimes,” she explained it so nonchalantly that it made me feel like I was the crazy one.

After talking for about an hour, I agreed.  We sealed it with a sloppy Tequila kiss.

Unsurprisingly, we broke up about two months later. I remember crying for days, as if I were surprised that she left me for a guy.  She was the first bad decision I ever made and she certainly wasn’t the last. My first relationship set the bar pretty low for my future relationships. The sins of my ex-girlfriends’ weighed me down and  I, in turn,  made equally selfish decisions to those who didn’t deserve it.

At 27, nearly 28, I am beginning to feel too old to be making such self-destructive decisions.  Although, I admit,  my natural attraction still pulls me towards girls like the Hot Mess, addictive and impossible to keep up with.

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I must pull myself together,
this is a brand new day.
Pull myself away from my mistakes.
Pull myself together,
it’s time to let the waves,
just take me,
pull me away.
-The Rocket Summer

I’ve been absent and I apologize. I’ve been in my head a lot lately, which is what I do when I’m stressed out, and I only come up for air when I have to.

Things with the Hot Mess are now over. Just as quickly as she entered my life, she’s left and moved on.  You know upfront that you can’t keep a girl like the Hot Mess, but you always hope you’re the exception.

“Yeah, I’m done talking to you right now,” she sneered. I don’t even remember what we were fighting about. It was about nothing. It was the kind of fight that you create just to fight.

“We’re not done talking about this,” I explained. “I mean, I guess we can talk more when I pick you up in an hour or so.”

“Yeah, about that,” she answered, taking long irritated pauses between words. “I don’t think you should come anymore.”

“Why?”

“It’s just not a good idea. I’m done talking to you right now. Bye.” I pressed my ear to my cellphone, forcing silence into my ears. I didn’t call her back and she didn’t call me. A few nights later, Otter called me in a panic, saying the Hot Mess was at the same bar as him and she was all over another girl.  I wasn’t upset, just mildly irritated, and consciously decided it was time to move on and make better decisions in my love life.

I think I should get one stupid I-really-know-better mistake per year. I have unfortunately used mine up already and it’s only February, so I’d better be making better choices for the rest of 2010.

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TheEx’s family had a New Year’s tradition of popping fireworks until midnight and then eating fresh saimin together at the dining room table. It’s a tradition established long before me and will continue with the next person theEx decides to share New Year’s Eve with. This year while I lit sparklers and drank champagne with my friends, I remembered those years I spent with theEx on New Year’s Eve with her family.

Long before theEx was, well, theEx, she was just known as Linda. I went with her to family functions and helped her mom wash dishes after her relatives left. On New Year’s Eve, I’d sit with her family at the dining room table and slurp through a bowl of fresh saimin.

Her brothers filled a stack of hollow bricks with fireworks in front of the house while Linda and her teenage sister, Jamie, wrote their names in the air with extra long sparklers. Linda’s mom sat in a broken lawn chair, poking their lopsided grill with a stick to keep the fire going.

“Let’s play a game,” Jamie mused, dropping her sparkler into a bucket of water and watching it fizzle out.

“Okay,” Linda answered, practicing a cursive “L” in the air.

“This is a ‘this or that’ game.  I’ll say to things and you have to choose one,” she explained.

I sat off to the side and crushed pop-pops under my shoe. Linda pulled up a chair next to me, tossing her sparkler into the bucket. “Okay, go,” she said.

“Okay, if you had to choose one person to save, who would you choose?” Jamie asked. She paused for dramatic effect and then continued, “Mom or Hitler?”

Linda laughed, open mouthed and wide, as if caught by surprise. “Mom, of course!”

“Okay, that was too easy,” Jamie replied, playing with the lighter. She lit another sparkler and shook it near Linda’s leg, white sparks bouncing on the pavement.

She pulled away, shooting Jamie a dirty look. “Okay, next.”

“Mom or Dad?” Jamie asked without hesitation. I knew the answer; Linda’s father was barely in the picture. He was merely a stack of giftcards scribbled with “from Dad”, sometimes “from Mark” when he wasn’t paying attention when signing.

“Mom,” Linda answered. She turned to me. “Do you want something to drink?”

I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m good.”

She kissed my cheek and leaned into me. “It’s almost midnight,” she whispered. “I love you.”

I crunched a pop-pop under my shoe. “I love you, too.”

“Hey! We’re not done playing!” Jamie pouted, pointing the fiery sparkler in Linda’s face. She hid in my shirt collar.

“Kristel or Mom.” It wasn’t really a question.

“Both!” Linda called out with a laugh, but Jamie wasn’t smiling.

“No, you can’t do that. That’s not how the game goes.”

Linda stood up, walking to where her brothers were still blowing up fireworks and just about anything they could fit into their stack of blocks. “I’m making my own rules,” she answered in that baby voice she used to talk to her family.

She grabbed Linda’s arm. “No, Linda. You have to choose one. You can’t save both. One will die and the other will live. You have to pick one.”

I tried not to look at either of them, but I could see them out of the corner of my eye. Linda’s mom had gone in the house to start boiling the saimin noodles and Linda’s brothers were busy filling the cement blocks with newspaper and smoke bombs.

“Mom,” I heard Linda say. I turned to see if she had called out to her, but I quickly realized it was answer.

“Good choice,” Jamie gloated, slapping Linda on the back. “You have to choose your family.”

I could feel Linda’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t stand to look at her.  She didn’t have to answer. She didn’t have to give in to her sister, who played the game just to watch my reaction.

“Kids! Saimin!” Linda’s mom called out from the kitchen. The boys dropped the lighters on the sidewalk and raced each other into the house.

“Ready to go?” Linda asked, reaching for my hand. She smiled at me, in exactly the same way she had when she said, ‘I love you’ earlier. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just tired.”

“Come on, let’s go eat.” We went inside and her mom handed me a steaming bowl of fresh saimin. Linda saved me a seat next to her and I spent the meal trying not to cry in my soup.

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I bought the Hot Mess a little souvenir from Seattle. Nothing fancy, just one of those vinyl blind box toys from Urban Outfitters.

“Can I see you today?” I asked, using my shoulder to press my phone against my ear while I silently ordered a bagel at this small coffee shop near the office.

“How was your trip?” She sounded distant on the phone, as if I had interrupted something.

“It was all right,” I answered. “Are you free later today? I brought you back something.”

“Come by after you finish work. I should be home by then.”

We hung up after, but I kept my ear pressed to the phone. I felt like I had missed something, some nuance in her voice that I was supposed to catch. I finished my bagel and walked back to the office thinking I should call her, but not doing it.

“Hi there, stranger,” I said when I picked her up. I thought I was being cute, but she only gave me a forced half-smile.

“How was your trip?” she asked.

“Good, just what I needed,” I sighed. “Hey, can you grab that package on the backseat? I got you something.”

“You got me a goody?!” she said, her face lighting up.

“Of course I did. It’s nothing fancy, though.”

She reached behind to grab the Urban Outfitters bag and dropped it on her lap. She took out the box and giggled at the chubby smoking rabbit printed on the side.  “I love it,” she said. “Thank you. Look which one I got.”

I turned to see her holding a plaid patterned smoking rabbit, fitting perfectly in her tiny hands.  “So you missed me while I was gone, huh?”

“No, who told you that!” she laughed.

“A little drunk birdie told me,” I answered, before she punched my arm.

“Well, maybe I missed you. Just a little.” She twisted the top of the Urban Outfitters package as if wringing out a wet t-shirt. “There’s something I have to tell you. It’s  important.”

“Sure, what’s up?” I asked. “Let me just pull into the parking lot ahead and you can have my full attention.” I turned into an almost empty parking lot connected to the beach. There were only a few cars there, mostly surfers sitting on the beds of their trucks talking about the waves.

Even after I parked the car, she didn’t say anything. I turned the car off, while Mandalay’s “It’s Enough Now” reached its climatic end.  “What are we?” she finally asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, what are we? Are we dating? What?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, never really thought about the logistics of all of this. I just know that I like spending time with you, that’s all.”

I reached across the seat to hold her hand, but she pulled away and folded both hands in her lap. “I don’t think you should do that,” she whispered.

“Oh–I’m sorry.”

“That night I called you,” she began to say. “I was out with a bunch of my friends. We went to this bar in town and I drank…a lot. I really missed you.”

“I remember you called.”

“So yeah, anyway, my ex was there that night.” At this point, she wasn’t even looking at me, just staring down at my gift on her lap. “She came right up to me and talked to me. Like seriously, what the fuck? She was making a really big scene saying she was so sorry she ever hit me. It was fucking embarrassing.”

I can’t remember if this is the point in the conversation where I feel like her story is going to make me want to vomit. “So what happened? Did your friends say anything?”

“No! They were dead fucking silent. Anyway, it was getting really out of hand so I told her let’s talk outside–”

I interrupted her, “Is that when you called me?”

She looked embarrassed, and then, defeated. “Yes.” Now the image I had of her drunk-dialing me has been re-formed with her ex standing beside her. I imagined her cooing in her ear as the Hot Mess tries to talk to me. I tried to not react, but I could feel my jaw tightening.

“So what happened?” It felt like pulling teeth from her, grabbing information I didn’t want but somehow felt I needed.

“Well, I don’t know. She and I talked for a while. And after she kind of sobered up, she was okay. I don’t know. I don’t know.” She shook her head and kind of smiled to herself.

“What? Just tell me already.”

“I slept with her last night.” I knew those words were coming, but they felt heavier when she actually said them. They filled the car with such tension that I had to roll down my window. I thought about her and her faceless ex having drunk, possibly regrettable sex somewhere and I felt sick.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s not like we were official or anything,” she said under her breath. “I don’t know.”

“I didn’t even say anything about that. I’m just wandering how you can call me and tell me you miss me and then go sleep with your ex right after.” My hands started to feel tight and hot. I didn’t feel like yelling at her, after all, she was right, we weren’t officially together.  We never made any agreement to be exclusive and honestly I never felt emotionally exclusive with her. But something about this guts me and leaves me feeling broken. Maybe it’s because the thrill of being with her has now been shattered by the reality that she’s not over her ex.

“Say something,” she whispered. “You haven’t said anything for the last 10 minutes.”

“I’m sorry. I really just don’t know what to say.” Eventually there really was nothing left to say other than sorry and the Hot Mess’ adamant assertion that we were never official followed by remorse for her actions. I drove her home and barely looked at her when she got out of the car.

“Can you call me when you get home? So I know you got home okay,” she says, peeking her head back in the car after she got out.

“Yeah, sure thing.” I drove home without remembering how I got there. I didn’t call the Hot Mess when I got inside my apartment and she never called me.

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