The Peace Offering

THREE

River

Rain giggled as she tapped on my phone screen lightly. "There. Sent."

"She's going to call me as soon as she sees it, and I can promise you I'm gonna be getting an earful from her," I chortled.

I had followed my sister to her favourite salon down at Belmont Avenue in our hometown Seattle that Sunday afternoon. When we arrived, one of Rain's regular hairstylist, Cameron, attended to me as soon as my sister announced that I wanted to dye my hair blonde. It took a good three hours to complete the process as my hair was long.

Rain captured a picture of me after Cameron finished blowdrying my hair and she immediately sent it to Paige via my phone. I was initially hesitant about the whole idea but Rain convinced me that since it would render a reconciliation impossible anyway when Paige finally sees me in my new blonde hair, I should follow through with the plan just to ease my dissatisfaction about the breakup.

"Oh shit! Shit, the girl's calling you!" Rain paused in her footsteps. We had just left the salon and were walking down the street in the direction of the café nearby which we agreed to go to for lunch.

"Just answer it. And put her on loudspeaker," I smirked. This was going to be fun.

Rain did as told and as soon as I greeted my ex-girlfriend with a 'hello', the girl literally barked. "The hell did you do to your hair, Riv?! Are you crazy? I hate it! Are you doing this on purpose?!"

"Yes, as a matter of fact I am. Who cares what you hate, Paige. I'm lovin' it and that's all that matters," I replied smugly. Rain tried to suppress a laughter by pursing her lips.

Paige huffed. "Whatever, okay? Have a good life."

Then just like that she hung up. I high-fived my sister and we both burst into hysterical laughter. My stomach hurt. "Oh my god, she was so mad. I actually felt bad about it."

"You shouldn't. Girl was a jackass," Rain patted my back after she recovered from her laughing fit. We continued our stroll towards our destination.

I couldn't help but to ponder on the reason why I was this unlucky in the love department. I was always getting dumped a few months after dating someone. They would always give me the same reason: that I was always "too boring" for them. None of my ex-girlfriends did explain why I was "too boring". They would only tell me that, then I would get mad about all the things that I did for them while we were together and the scene would end with me furiously walking away.

This happened about seven times in the entire eighteen years of my existence. Now I was beginning to think that God created a bunch of girls who conspired to take turns in getting involved with me, making me fall in love with them and then breaking up with me because I was "too boring". Come to think of it, most of them had one important trait in common: they were all adventurous.

Paige, my girlfriend of six months, loved hiking. Every month she would set aside a weekend to walk on a new hiking trail in another state. Heck, the girl even flew to Indonesia to scale Mount Bromo. Haley, my girlfriend of three months before Paige, loved driving on road trips and stopping at a random cliff before taking off her clothes and jumping off the damn cliff. And then there was my third girlfriend of five months, Kimi, a Japanese foodie who needed to go to a new restaurant to try out different types of food every time we went out. The rest of my ex-girlfriends, I think you get the idea already.

Whereas I, River Milton, mostly ate the same kinda dishes during lunch. I did not enjoy spontaneous cliffdiving, neither did I enjoy walking on end for hours and getting myself all sweaty and stinky in an attempt "to better enjoy nature", quoting the exact words of my very recent ex-girlfriend. On Saturdays I attended piano classes. In my free time I enjoyed watching documentaries on how the universe was made.

So the entire idea of this bunch of girls conspiring against me could be possible. Or was I just really boring?