Love Her Madly

Chapter 1. Paddles

Grown men were not meant to understand women; no man was. The fact was that women were so complicated they’d actually mastered simplicity. Take for example, the simple way in which Katja threw her keys at me, the simple way she grabbed her purse and slung it over her shoulder, all the while having no hitch or pitch impairment in her voice as she told me “you are a worthless piece of shit”.

Why did I deserve this dramatic scene at eight in the morning?  I really did not know. But as she stomped towards the door of my apartment and turned around to face me, a single dramatic tear grazing her reddened cheeks, I think I understood even less.

“You can’t just expect me to wait for you David,” she said, her right hand holding on to the door knob. “I’m twenty-nine, I want kids. If you don’t know what you want, figure it the fuck out! But I’m not waiting around for you while you do!”

Slam. The door quaked slightly, leaving a slight trace of floral perfume from Katja’s unexpected departure.

The real question was –the thing I really racked my brain on– was how the hell she got the key to my apartment and who gave it to her. As far as I was concerned, I never once offered her a key to my apartment in the three months I’d been dating her.

What did she mean “figure out what I wanted”? How was I supposed to know if I wanted to marry someone or settle down with them after only three months? And if all she really wanted was to pop out some half Davids with cute dimples and wavy black hair why didn’t she just say so? I would have at least known not to have gone down that road at all.

It isn’t like I didn’t want kids, I did. Really, I did. But why did I need to be ready for them then? I was only 29, perhaps verging a little too close on thirty, but who expected even a thirty year old to be ready for kids these days? And why don’t women who want to settle down right away and get straight to the white picket fence just flat out tell the guy “hey, before we start anything, you should know if you don’t propose to me in the next three months I’m going to barge into your home at 7:45 in the morning and unleash a tornado in your carefully organized apartment”? I knew why, because even though women were complicatedly simple, they were still simply complicated. I'd confused myself.

This is a good time to have some cereal, I thought.

**********

“So she just barged in, threw shit around and then left?” Artur asked me disinterestedly. It’s almost like he saw this coming, but for me to fully grasp that I’d had to admit my shithead friend actually had some sense in him. I took a sip of my beer, looking around at the small, busy pub we were in to make sure Katja wasn’t lurking anywhere listening to our conversation.

“Yeah, I swear to god Art, it was weirdest moment of the life. Weirder than when Mallory Klatt tried to give me a rim job at after grad in her hello kitty costume”, I said.

Artur laughed, possibly thinking back to the event and how I had run from Mallory’s house in my boxers.

“But seriously Dave,” he said more seriously, “you must have seen that coming; Katja reeked of desperation and entrapment.”

My eyebrows furrowed. “But what do you expect from me when desperate women planning entrapment is all I can get at my apparently ancient age of 29?”

Artur rolled his eyes at me but laughed anyways. “What am I going to do with you bud?”

“Find a girl who’s willing to be big spoon at least some of the time.” I answered simply.

He shook his head at me but decided to move on from the topic. “So, I was thinking we could maybe go kayaking this weekend…”

I looked at him quizzically. “You know I can’t, I have to go see my mom to get my routine, weekly harassment speech of why I refuse to be a good Christian boy and let myself be fruitful and multiply.”