Settling down

He was desperate to get away from the loneliness that was his life. She wanted to stop feeling miserable for herself. He thought deep & hard to himself if he should do what he needed to. He wasn’t sure he liked her. He couldn’t tell if they would be good together. Yet, he hid his thoughts away deep inside his head and decided he couldn’t be much worse off than he already was. Gathering the bits and pieces that he had become, he put on his best suit and reserved a table as fancy as his wallet could afford. He told her, “Let’s not call it anything. It’s been long since I met you, and we’ve been talking so much over the phone, it would be ungentlemanly of me to not invite you to dinner already. We’ll eat all we like, break a bottle of wine, and call it a night. You will know I’ve gained weight, and I can see just how beautiful you’ve become.”

As they sat across each other, the thoughts he hid away became the voice in his head, reminding him why it would never work out, and she pretended to laugh at all his bad jokes. She decided to skip dessert if it would help make the evening less tiring on her, and he told himself he had had worse. The empty bottle of wine seemed to get more interest from both of them than they could give each other. As the wine gave them back the love, they made themselves believe they could settle for this. They threw away all the emotions they had found in love earlier, and pretended they liked each other. He walked her home and she called him in. The night passed, and they woke up a couple, to a life full of disappointments and settling for less. They told themselves this is what they wanted. They kept reminding themselves they were in love, as they drifted further apart from until they could no longer face each other. This was their life now.