Buzzfeed, Boys, Black Magic

he's in love with California and breaking my heart

            "So, you wanna check out your California options first," I pictured girls with full lips and tiny waists and hair to their hips. Abby's words rang in my ears. Once a fuckboy, always a fuckboy.

            "Lee," he groaned. "Please. Look at it from my perspective. What if you met a brilliant, hilarious girl, six months removed from a traumatic life event, who told you she wanted to give up all her potential to clean your dirty dishes? Would you just let her do that?"

            "Yes?"

            He sat up.

            I sat up beside him.

            "No," he said.

            "Well, I don't know," I finally said. "It's not like I have ever been opposed to California. I applied to work at the Griffith Observatory a few months ago."

            He smiled.

            "You never told me that?"

            "I was rejected before we met," I said. "It's ok, though, it would have been doing basically the same thing I'm doing at Newton. Not a huge loss."

            He glanced at the sheets on his bed and then back at me and then at his sheets again. He ran his fingers through his hair. It looked as if he added several numbers in his head

            "Ok," he said. "You can stay with me in California."

            "What?"

            My heart thumped wildly in my chest.

            "But I have a few conditions first."

            "Sure, what, anything?" I stuttered.

            "We break up first," he said.

            "Are you playing a fucking game here-"

            "Listen," he said. "This is an uneven playing field. I know exactly what I want. I want you to have at least a foggy idea of what you want, besides me," he said.

            "So how is breaking up going to help any of that?"

            "I think there might be a possibility that I'm distracting you from meeting the you, you need to be."

            "That sounds like some misplaced self-help garbage, Rafi."

            "It might be," he shrugged. "Maybe I'm wrong about and you just want to be my housewife forever."

            "Would you be good with that?" I tried to suppress the hope I felt building in my chest.

            He smiled a crooked smile.

            "I'm 99% sure I won't have to worry about that, because I'm 99% sure I'm not wrong about you. But to prove it, we have to break up. Eliminate variables."

            "So we break up, and then what?" I shrugged.

            "Six months of no-to-limited contact. Then, I'll call you. If you've actually tried to figure stuff out and you realized there's nothing out there for you and you say, 'Rafi, all I want to do is clean bongs,' I'll book you the next available flight to me." He chuckled.

            "You know there's nothing wrong with that," I said, "being a homemaker."

            "Of course, there's nothing wrong with it," he said. "It's just not you."

            "It's not what you think I am," I said.

            "Right," he said.

            "So what if you're right about me and suddenly I decide I want to climb the corporate ladder?"

            "Well, I guess then we decide what you want to do," he said. "If you wanna move out to California then, we'll do a job search. Or if you want to go to grad school, we'll put in an application to Berkeley."

            "Yeah, right," I smirked.

            "No," he said, "really."

            "Well what are you going to do for the next six months? You're really going to wait all that time for me?"

            "Why not?" he shrugged.

            "You promise you'll actually call me in six months?" I could almost feel the skeptical expression on my face.

            "If you promise that while we're apart, you'll only do things that are healthy for you."

            He held out a pinky. 

            I laced mine around his.

            I knew in my gut this wasn't a promise I could keep.

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