Ctrl Alt Del

Baggage

I want to scorch Nils's face with my cigarette. Right on his cheek, just below his mole. Is that horrible? Does the fact that I want bloodcurdling screams to replace his self-righteous mien make me a horrible person, or is that only reserved for when I go through with it?

We had a fight, and I enjoy watching the antagonistic glances he throws my way through the blinds. He found my cigarette packet this morning. I normally hide it behind the pots in the balcony, but I must have left it out last night. I woke up to a cold, empty apartment, and the packet lying on my vanity table pinned down with a passive aggressive sticky note that read, "Bravo."

He's had a pissy attitude ever since he got back from his jog. And I get it. He doesn't like me smoking, but he acts like I've handed him the biggest disappointment of the year. Like he's come home to find someone's taken a crap in his shoes. He acts like Mum whenever I breathe in her vicinity, and I don't like how that makes me feel—like an infant. Like I can't have something that's mine, that he doesn't like, without twisting it into a deal breaker.

I was a smoker when he met me. I stopped, just as I'm planning to stop in the future—but this isn't about that. This is about him wanting to control me. He's already turned our apartment into a shine of all things healthy. He picked out our living room carpet based on how suitable it was for his Saturday afternoon yoga. I let him do that. I let him mistake my misplaced love for passivity, and it made him all the more bolder to demand I compromise my integrity.

So I gave it to him this morning. We went at it. Both of us digging deep for those ugly sentiments that had been chipping away at us in private these past months. I wasn't mincing my words when I said, "Your body is not a temple. All that kale, and quinoa, and those fucking disgusting juices—you seem to have forgotten where they go, Nils. They go down that toilette. You shit. You shit, and when you die, you'll become a big pile of decomposed shit.

"And you're so afraid. Admit it! You're afraid of tracking in the tiniest speck of dirt on the mat, and crumbs on the table, and anything that pollutes your precious temple and reminds you, you're going to die. 

"You're going to die, face it. Don't run from it."

"I rather not die coughing up my fucking lungs. There's a difference," he yelled back. And it was from that point onwards our argument plummeted in maturity and became a competition of who could score the pettiest points. Feelings got hurt, and now we've resorted to occupying opposite ends of the apartment to lick our wounds in private.

But I'm over feeling hurt. I want to hurt back. I light a cigarette, making sure the balcony door stays wide open with my foot. I lean against the railing and make a show of exhaling into the apartment. I don't take my eyes off him in the window. He's in the kitchen, the furthest distance away when measuring straight across our 640 square feet apartment. He's bowed over his papers, his fingers fast at work on the keyboard, but I don't miss the way his typing tappers off as more smoke diffuses his way. When he glances up with a scowl on his face, it should feel like a triumph, but it tastes bitter. Resentment backwashes in my mouth and aggregates in the corners under my tongue. The longer I savour the cigarette, the more frustrated he gets. I'm not stupid. I hear the warning he hammers into the keyboard.

The outline of his tense shoulders is partly obscured by the slats in the window, but the frustration in nonetheless there. Will he get up? I want him to. I want him to come storming out, push me away from the door and slam it in my face. But I know he won't. His animosity won't extend farther than throwing angry looks my way. That's just Nils. He's a bedrock of unwavering patience in the turbulence that is my existence. It's when I've pushed and pushed, and Nils doesn't give in and retaliate that I know that I'm in the wrong. It doesn't make the bitter pill go down any easier, but it cools my head long enough for the realisation to sink in—I need to apologise.