musings while re-doing the dishes

on big biophysicist brains + their small hearts

Crawling out of bed at 1am just to do the dishes, I had to fucking laugh at the absurdity of it all. Man, Camus would get a kick out of this.

Sure, the biophysicist finally took the initiative to do them a few hours earlier. I made dinner, after all. My finest eggplant parm to date. It was February 14th and of course Cool Girl Su played the “I don’t give a shit about Hallmark holidays” card and truly I did not. When he dropped a box of protein bars on my lap, it was only then I began to care. You walked into your local GNC and thought of me, thought of romance? Cool. Cool. Thank you?

A low “You shouldn’t have!” escaped through gritted teeth as I sliced the fresh mozz. No, really. If this was the best you could do. Next time just don’t.

That’s the thing about romance, sometimes you’re oblivious to how much you craved just a small sliver of it until it ceases to exist.

Okay, he did the dishes. But he missed so many spots, so many fucking spots. How does someone with a PhD not notice all of the burnt sauce stains? I tied my hair up, began cleaning the mess he left behind. He completely disregarded the cheese along the edges, that had to be done on purpose, right? My vision ain’t worth shit but his was 20/20. Even the blind as a bat would’ve noticed. For someone who excelled at everything he did, he sure seemed to half-ass all things related to me.

He’d hurled the dishes on the drying rack in no particular order, haphazardly mixing the coffee mugs with the salad plates. “They won’t all fit that way, you know,” is what I wanted to say. But again, I thanked him instead.

What had mom always preached, while she took her dinner standing up because the table had no seat for her? “Don’t you go on being overbearing, don’t teach a man how to do something, don’t ask for a lot, don’t be too much. Hear me?”

Yeah ma’ I heard you.

So I let him do the dishes all wrong.

And I silently snuck out of bed in the middle of the night to do them right.