The Day the Fucking Remote Control Kept Falling
She finished her ice cream and put the empty bowl and spoon on the coffee table in front of her. It was a weird flavor of ice cream. It was called “Jub Jub Candy Coo Coo” or something stupid and long like that.
She and her boyfriend sat on the couch, watching a stressful TV show about a fucked up family that just couldn’t seem to get their act together, no matter how hard they tried.
The remote control was on the side table next to her boyfriend. But it kept falling. It was jarring, the way it kept falling. She’d lose herself in the show and then the fucking remote control would fall off the table.
“Why does that keep falling?” she finally snapped.
He looked at her and said “I don’t know? Jesus, sorry.”
The way he said “sorry” pissed her off because she could tell by his tone that he wasn’t sorry at all.
“I just don’t understand why it keeps falling,” she said, but she didn’t say it in a I’m sorry I snapped sort of way. She said it in the same Why the fuck does the motherfucking remote control keep falling way that she’d asked it before.
He stared at her with enlarged eyes. They weren’t huge. But they were bigger than normal, which was even more irritating to her than the way he’d just said “sorry.”
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said.
He kept staring at her. Normally, at this point she’d laugh and he’d knowingly say “Yeah” because they both knew she was probably just tired or menstruating or something.
But this time, she just repeated “Stop staring at me like that.” She said it the same snappy way that she’d asked “Why does that keep falling?”
He kept staring. He probably either thought he was being funny or he really was mildly surprised that she was having such an extreme reaction over a remote control.
She stared back at him. And then the tears crept up, from deep inside of her belly. Sometimes, they came up from her throat, or her chest, or her heart. But this time, they came up from deep inside of her belly and dropped out of her eyes, slow and heavy.
She put her face in her hands and sobbed the same way that the tears came out, slow and heavy. She thought He probably thinks I’m faking it. This doesn’t even sound like real crying.
It felt like maybe there was a crying pipe in the deep, dark depths of her belly, and that the tiny man who was in charge of sitting on it had stood up to have a big stretch. You could say that it felt about as shitty as that simile you just read. Yeah, about as shitty as the idea of a fucking crying pipe in your goddamn stomach.
She felt her boyfriend’s big, warm hand on her shoulder and so she cried harder because he was being nice and she felt like an irrational bitch.
In a quiet voice,he gently and genuinely asked “Was it the ice cream?”
That made her cry even harder, because of how fucking sweet it was that he thought it might be the ice cream. That maybe she didn’t like the flavor of it, or maybe it was too soupy, which must have driven her to tears.
As she willingly propelled herself into what outwardly appeared to be an unjustified display of emotion, she didn’t think the following things in a clear, cohesive way. They were more so a mix of incomplete thoughts and feelings dry humping each other into a blurry, hysterical mass.
Was it the ice cream? God, that’s so sweet. Ice cream reminds me of being little. I wish I was little again. When I was little, I didn’t know what anxiety felt like. When I was little, I wasn’t a raging bitch all the time. I want to feel normal again. I fucking I hate this. I hate it! He doesn’t deserve this. When will I feel okay again? What if this is all a dream? Oh my God, what if he isn’t even here right now? What if I’ve lost my mind and I’ve been living alone in this apartment thinking that I have a boyfriend, but really I just went crazy months ago and made this life up in my head? Shit. What if the legend of Slender Man is real and he’s hiding in my shower right now? Stop it. Slender Man isn’t real, dumbass…God, but what if he is?!
She thought stuff like that, which she realized was distorted and untrue and at times, completely irrelevant. Except for the bit about wanting to feel little again and the part about her boyfriend not deserving it. And maybe the part about Slender Man, too.
“What’s wrong?” He asked.
“I don’t know,” she whined, but not the way a kid whines about not wanting to go to bed. She whined the way a little kid whines when they have a bad stomach ache and they want their mom to make it feel better because just saying the words “I don’t know” makes them feel like they’re going to puke.
Throughout all of this, the man from the shitty simile about the stupid crying pipe kept sitting on its opening and standing back up, like the water pressure was too much for his tiny, imaginary ass.
Her tears would go away and then force themselves back up, slow and heavy, over and over again. Sometimes, when she cried like this for what seemed like no reason, she’d say “I really am okay” to which her boyfriend would reply “I know you are.”
This time, she said “I really am o--” but then the tiny man stood up from the fucking pipe again and she realized that she wasn’t okay. However, she did feel like she could finally relate to this one Facebook friend she had who always posted vague shit like “Even though not being okay doesn’t feel okay, it is okay.”
That night, she went to bed early. Her boyfriend brought a huge cord into the bedroom, which connected his PS4 from the living room to his PS3 in the bedroom, because she didn’t want to be alone. She wasn’t really sure how the cord set-up worked, actually. He’d started to explain it but she didn’t really listen because she was thinking about whether or not Slender Man was balanced upside-down on the ceiling of her closet.
While he hooked up the giant cord, he kept saying things like “Don’t trip on this cord” and “Watch out for this cord” and “One trip on this cord is bad news.”
Jesus, she got it the first time. Watch out for the fucking cord.
For a brief moment, she wanted to trip over the cord as hard she could, just to prove a point. But she looked at her boyfriend, incoherently mumbling as he fumbled around with it, and she felt a wave of immense love for him. The desire to ruin his cord went away and she felt hopeful that someday, she'd be able to get the whole "raging bitch" thing under control.
At some point during the night, she woke up to use the bathroom and turned on the hallway light, just in case the whole Slender Man bullshit ended up being legitimate, which again, she knew it wasn’t.
As she walked back toward bed, her boyfriend woke up and sleepily mumbled “Watch out for the cord.”
Then, Slender Man stuck his egg-shaped head out of the closet and said “Yeah, one trip on that cord really is bad news.” Just kidding about the Slender Man part.
