Lucidrous Hypothetical Conversations

Originally posted here on October 7 2019: 

writing-prompt-s:

“Would you die for me?”

“Again?”

“What?” he asked. He looked amused, as if she’d just said something humorous, but he got the joke an she didn’t.

She was not amused. “About once a month you ask me a question like this. I’ve been ignoring it, because I was having fun, but it’s getting weird. You ask me if I’d do something extreme to save you. Would I give up an arm to save you. My leg, my big toes, my smile. You’ve asked me this question about most of the parts of my body, including those I’d need to survive, phrasing it as some cute hypothetical that I then play off and try not to act like you just asked me something deeply weird.”

He blinked. “That’s not-”

“You want to know if I’d destroy myself for you. That’s really what it’s about.” She leaned back and stared up. The trees above them shivered in the breeze. “We have this conversation over and over, in different ways, and have since we started having lunch together. You want to know if I’ll collapse myself for you, make myself smaller, destroy the things about me that make me me, and whole. The answer is the same as it’s always been.”

“I think you’re reading too much into it.” He scoffed, still holding onto being amused, as if she were a very cute puppy who’d just piddled itself, not a real adult human being with thoughts and feelings of her own. 

She doubled down. “You take me to lunch several times a week and occasionally, at some point slip into the conversation some question about what I would be willing to give up to preserve you, the way you are. And then you get upset about the answer. You try not to show it, but you do. The truth is that maybe I’d give up a few strands of hair for you. Or my fingernail, cut to the quick. A papercut, maybe, for you. To preserve you, to keep you as the man you are. And you don’t like that. Sometimes I might bend over backwards during ludicrous hypothetical conversations in order to keep your feelings from being too hurt by my actual, blunt answer.” She sighed. “No. The answer is no, Tom.” 

He laughed, but not with mirth. It was purely reactionary, a laugh of disbelief.

“I wouldn’t give up my arm, or liver, or big toes, or pinkie finger, or teeth for you. I wouldn’t give up my life for you. I might give up a patch of dead skin for you. Or maybe an unsightly mole. A few shed hairs. My right pinkie toenail, maybe. Maybe. It’s cracked anyway and I think it’s going to fall off. But I will not destroy myself for you.”

His laughter had died, and there was a look on his face. A look of anger and sadness both.

She glanced at him. “Don’t ask questions when you’re not prepared for the answer. Especially not over and over again. No, Tom. I won’t die for you. I won’t live for you, either. And I think I have better things to do with my Tuesdays than this.”

“You can walk back home, then,” he said, getting up. Perhaps he expected her to chase him. Or even react.

“It’s a nice day,” she said, “I could use a walk.” It wasn’t really all that far, all told. 

He threw a bottle of water on the ground. Ineffectively capped, it splashed water on her. 

She ignored it. She knew it was on purpose., but it was such a petty thing. Besides, water dried. 

He didn’t leave. He stared at her, stretched out and staring at the trees. “You really don’t care about me at all?” There was both anger and sadness stretched in his voice. Petulant and abandoned.

She glanced at him. He was glaring at her, impotence and shock written on his face. “If caring about you means I must be willing to destroy myself in order to preserve you, then no.” She stood, slowly. Letting him see that she was angry at him, and unafraid of the consequences of that anger. “If you believe to care about you means I must somehow value your own self more than I do my own. That you have more value than me, inherently, in how I view the world. No. If caring about you means I must manage your own feelings, to my own detriment, no. And that, I have been doing, until now. No, Tom. You ask too much, and give too little, and I am done with it.”

His nostrils flared, and he stared at her for another long moment, before storming away. 

She watched him go, and then sat back on the ground, stretching out beneath the trees. The wind whistled through the leaves, and they shook and whispered in the breeze. She let the anger boil off her, soothed by the sound of the wind in the trees, and did not indulge in regret.