Thomas and I have been in a relationship for about three years and I don’t think I’ve ever liked him once. He has a weak chin and a dead plant in the corner of his room he keeps promising to throw out. We went to college together. You know when you get roped into something and it spirals and you end up hating yourself and your life and everything around you?
How it happened was three years ago, he asked me to borrow a pot, and then a week later asked me out, and he still hadn’t given my pot back. I thought if I said no I’d never see my pot again. It’s Le Creuset. My mother gave it to me for my apartment.
Thomas is an “artist,” but really he works in sales. He once hung a painting in a gallery of a beached whale with a human head. Thomas says it’s symbolic. We are the whale, and death is capitalism. He took a college class on environmental sociology. He paid the gallery six hundred dollars.
He’s the type of guy to tell me at length about all the different people that hit on him. I think he’s making some of them up. I don’t get hit on that much. He once told me a girl called him pretty at a party and he “refused to make eye contact with her.” I said he was manipulative. He called me a crazy bitch. Except he didn’t actually say that, because he’s the type of guy who secretly believes in traditional gender norms and doesn’t speak badly of women. I wish he had said it.
He demands to walk on the side of the road closer to the cars, which might be a sweet gesture if I didn’t absolutely despise it. He refuses to split the pole. He sleeps in socks. He lied to my parents that he’d seen Monty Python when really he hasn’t. I daydream about catching Thomas fucking the girl from the party.
I bet you’re wondering if I even like guys. I was too, until last year when I danced with a hot guy at a Miami dayclub and realized that it was definitely just Thomas. I don’t consider this cheating because we were wearing swimsuits in the pool. Thomas and I have sex twice a week. He blindfolds me. I pretend he’s Chad Michael Murray.
It’s honestly not all bad. One of his friends is an intern at the White House, and I really want to meet the vice president. We’re engaged. I’m pregnant. He still has my pot. I’m thinking about leaving him. Would I be the asshole?
