Dating : Eating and Crying

Never once in my life have I done these two things at the same time.

Until I did.

The laughter of my family bled under my shut door and buzzed in my ears. The two hours and eighteen minutes spent investing in a new Netflix original movie had finally expired. And now I was left staring up at the credits rolling by, as my anxiety began to remind me why I had chosen to distract myself with a movie to begin with.

I shot up like I had been electrocuted and began pacing around the bedroom; back and forth back and forth, teeth grinding under my nails aggressively. What now? Whatnow? Whatnowwhatnowwhatnow?

A knock at the door. My brother — a slice of freshly baked pizza, awkwardly placed on a very thin napkin in his hands. He looked at me with a face he often makes when he knows I’m feeling blue, but he wants me to crack a smile to remind me that life is beautiful and multicolored. I smirked some, also surprised at the personal delivery of the steaming slice of pizza. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at his kind gesture. But sometimes, just sometimes, I find myself forgetting how nurturing my family is, and am greeted with that little “Oh!” expression on my face at their natural kindnesses.

I looked down at the slice, it had been curiously cut. I felt my eyebrows squish together. My brother must have noticed my expression, because he quickly pointed out that the slice came cut like that; the slice, cut in two down the middle horizontally at a slight angle. We both stared down at the pizza, now in my hands, heads tilted like curious critters.

“What does it mean?” I asked quietly, jokingly… kind of.

“I don’t know!” he exclaimed with genuine awe, a rather large smile taking over his features.

I chuckled then, I actually managed a real chuckle at his reaction.

“I like how you took my question quite seriously,” I noted, still feeling my smile.

We went back to examining the slice. Then, just as quickly as he had come in, we exchanged a shrug, he had left, and suddenly my smile was gone and I was alone again.

I went to my side of the bed and sat, feet firmly planted on the floor. I found myself staring at the slice again. What does it mean? I whispered to the empty room this time. When a response wasn’t given, I hung my head in disappointment, picked up the bottom half of the pizza and took a bite. Then another. By the third bite I found my throat swelling, a clear indication that emotion was making an appearance, making it hard to swallow my food. For a split second, I felt like I was in middle school again: eating alone in the bathroom stall to avoid being bullied for the lunch period. Just a blink later, I was back in my bedroom, pushing down my emotion so I could eat in peace.

But then my fiancee entered the room.

I felt my body tense up. I hoped he couldn’t tell that I was about to burst into tears while eating a greasy slice of pizza…

Trying to keep it together as best as I could, I took another slow bite of the pizza. I heard him, rustling around behind me, putting away the laundry I had folded earlier. A drawer opened, closed. The closet, opened and closed. Back and forth, more drawers.

And just like a corny RomCom, when I finally had the courage to begin to turn my head in his direction, the bedroom door was shut, and I was alone again, awkwardly sliced pizza in hand, and the echo of the door deafening me.

I mean… we weren’t butterflies and rainbows at the moment, having had another rather difficult and draining conversation earlier in the day… but him not having acknowledged my presence in the room made me feel so easily unseen, that I retreated back to my little slice of pizza delivered with love.

And just like that, my little slice of pizza delivered with love now suddenly looked so… sad? I tilted my head to the side once more, inspecting it for the last time.

There it sat atop my left palm as awkwardly as before, one little bite left of the bottom half. The oils shone, pooling in the middle of the one slice of pepperoni. The grease, it soaked into the napkin noticeably and now the napkin was slowly beginning to look like rice paper. Orangey rice paper.

My little slice of pizza delivered with love had now officially become a sad little slice of pizza.

A single teardrop fell, missing the pizza, the napkin, every body part along the way, and landed in between my two feet still firmly on the ground.

Oh god this pizza looks so sad…

How could a piece of food evoke such a depth of sadness?

And then I was crying. No. Sobbing. I was sobbing.

And as I was sobbing, I was taking small bites of my sad little slice of pizza, until there was no more sad little pizza left.

All that was left after, was my inability to stop crying and one question that kept floating around my head:

What does it mean?