For the next few days, after that fight with The Hot Dog, I worked late at the office.  Or to be more precise, I said that I was working late, but really I was just watching old episodes of The Office.  When I would come home, Debbie would already be asleep in bed.  I’d crash on the couch, which was uncomfortable, but made me feel as if I was proving a point, to both the Hot Dog and myself.

So, in short, it took me much longer than it should have to notice that Debbie was sick.  Like really sick.

By the third day of our “fight” I couldn’t take coming home at 1 in the morning anymore, and when I got back she was awake in bed, coughing.  It was a sort of dry wheezing, but something about the sound was off.  When I walked into the bedroom and looked down, I saw she was green all over, and covered in whelts.

-Oh my God!  What happened!?

-It’s (cough) it’s ok Peter.  I’m just a little (cough COUGH cough)… sick.

-We have to go to a hospital!

-No.  No hospitals.

-But, you need-

-NO.  No hospitals.

My eyes started to water up, and it hit me suddenly that I knew this was coming.  Like deja vous or a bad dream, I all of a sudden knew this had already happened.  But even still, looking down at her, this was much much worse.

I’ve often imagined this moment where you are with another person, and they are sick, and dying, and suddenly you get to be heroic and take care of them, and it’s like a movie.  But this was nothing like a movie.  It was bleak, and horrible, and unfair.

I leaned over to Debbie and held her in my arms.

-I’m sorry!  I’m so sooo sorry.

-I know Peter.  I’m sorry too.

-But you didn’t DO anything!

-Maybe I expected too much.  Maybe I was too naive.  I wanted to believe that a man and a hot dog could defy the odds and love each other…but that’s…that was foolish of me.

-No!  I do love you!  I love you soo much!

I reached down and pulled the Hot Dog close to my face, which was red and tear stained.  I started kissing the hot dog, crying, which is when my roommate walked in.

I suppose, seeing a man in his 20′s carressing a clearly rotten hot dog, while crying would have bothered the average person, but Kelly, just looked at me for a split second, dropped off her luggage, and backed out of the room like a cartoon burglar.

I thought to say something, but everything was happening so fast, and it seemed irrelevant anyway.  I turned my face back to Debbie, and pressed my forehead against her bun.

-Peter, this is good.  It’s ok.  I mean, it’s the way life goes.

-No!  I don’t want this!  I want you!  I want to be with you!  I fucked up, and I’m sorry, but we can fix this!

Debbie coughed again, and it felt like she closed her eyes.  There was this pause that lasted forever, and for a second, I thought she was gone.  But then, she cleared her throat and said:

-Petey, this moment, this time we had together, well (cough) that was more than either of us could have asked for.  I know you don’t know much about me, you have been so kind to respect my boundries, but you should know this: before I met you, I didn’t think I could be with anyone else.  I thought I was just dead inside.

A part of me wanted to make a food stuff joke, about her being dead inside to lighten the mood, but it seemed woefully inappropriate.  But the she went:

-And not just because I’m reconstituted meat stuff.

I started laughing in between my tears, and smiled.

She laughed too, and I held her tighter.

-Listen, what I’m saying is this: our time here is brief, and hard.  One day you are swimming along in a bath of hot dog water, feeling like you are on top of the world, and next thing you know, it’s out into the harsh cruel world.  When I met you, I really felt something, and I know that my life wouldn’t have been nearly as rich if it wasn’t spent with you, for better or worse.

-I just, I just feel like such an assho-

-Shhh. Petey, we all make mistakes, all have to learn how to do this thing.  It’s ok.  You’re human.

I got really pensive all of a sudden, trying to understand what was happening.  I felt like I was getting dumped, but also like I was being carried.  I looked back down at Debbie and asked:

-How did you get so wise?

-I’ve been around the block a few times.

Then she started coughing a lot, and her skin was dripping with perspiration.  I ran to the bathroom and got some tissues, and blotted her “face”.  It seemed like old times all of a sudden, holding her, with napkins in my hands, and I lost it.  I cried so hard, my chest hurt.  She kept trying to shush me, saying “there there” but it was no use.  I couldn’t hold back what I was feeling.

After I was done crying, which seemed like an eternity, I laid down next to her in the bed and kicked off my shoes.  We talked for awhile that night, about life and love, and just being happy.  She said she was really happy, and I wanted to believe her, even though I’m not sure it was true.  The next morning I woke up, and she was next to me, but…

She was gone.

I spent the next few days in a fog.  I couldn’t tell you if I ate, or shat, or anything.  Some stuff I dealt with, namely dealing with her remains, but aside from that I was a wreck.  Even burying her was a nightmare.  When I finished digging in the back yard, where I put her body, Cuna, the neighbors pitbull started pawing at the spot, and I lost my shit and kicked her.  I’m not proud of it, but it happened.

It took me about a week straight of crying and sleeping before I even felt human again.  I cried so much my face hurt, my eyes felt dry all the time.  I never even thought it was possible to cry like that.  By the second night Kelly came home and would just hold me while I bawled.  She never asked me what happened, but I think she knew.  Regardless, that kind of sympathy was amazing, and I almost felt, actually I totally felt it was wasted on me.  Who was I to deserve comforting?  What made me worthy of love?  When push came to shove and I actually had the opportunity to love another, I blew it, and was too fixated on my own wants and needs.

I started to go back to work, mainly because I had used up all of my sick days, and couldn’t afford not too.  In the interim the Ad agency had promoted me from freelance to full time, which was good I guess.  Everything felt pretty meaningless to tell you the truth.  I would sit in my cubicle with Glenda listening to her chatter on, just zombied out until it was time to go home.  Then I’d go home, and lay in bed sometimes not even sleeping, and get up and do it again.

It wasn’t until a month and a half later, that I found the note she left in my shoes I had kicked off that night.  I stopped wearing them, mainly because the canvas was spattered in relish from cleaning up after the mess.  But inside of the shoe was scrawled,

“I love you and don’t you forget it.  Be happy, even if only for me.  Yours forever, Deb.”

I was so incredibly overwhelmed, that I didn’t even stop to think about how she was able to write that, for, well, until now really.

I kept that note in my pocket and would rub it when ever I missed her, to the point that it wore thin, and no longer had any text on it, just the faint hint of where the words once were.  After a few months, the paper was basically lint.

The last time I held it, before I put it in my hope box (shut up, I know) I thought about the last things that me and Debbie talked about.  I was surprised with how close to home her words about feeling dead inside rang true to me.  But what I also remember thinking a lot, even when Debbie first said that was, “That’s ridiculous!  How could she have even considered not sharing all of that love inside her.”  Which, was pretty hypocritical, as I had stopped letting myself really experience stuff years ago.  Here I was, in my twenties with a job I couldn’t care less about, just wasting time, and space, holding onto a the tattered remains of a piece of paper a hot dog gave me a year ago.

It was a year to the day when I finally mustered up the courage to go back to that vendor on 37th street.  I’m not quite sure what I thought would happen, but I felt like I was finally ready to open up to the possibility of feeling something again.

So when I saw her there, smiling at me with her long flowy hair standing in front of the vendor dressed up in that big hot dog suit handing out flyers, I…I just knew I was ready for something amazing to happen.

I felt like I was sitting there forever, I had no idea what to do.  So when I heard the familiar clip clop back into the men’s room, I figured it was just time to leave.  I got up and walked out of the stall and made eye contact with Martin for a second.  He looked at me, the stall and then the hot dog, and thought to say something about it, but I guess he was so confused or embarrassed he let it pass.

When I went back to my desk, I had been gone for a really long time.  Glinda asked if I was feeling well, which at this point, I wasn’t.  I knew she meant if I was sick, but rather than explain (where would I have started?), I just said no.  So in an extreme moment of kindness on her part, or just basic germaphobia, she let me go home early.  I grabbed my jacket, and gingerly put the hot dog in my messenger bag and took off.

As soon as we got out the door to the building, I took the hot dog out of the bag. By this point, I was crying.  I don’t know if I can explain it, but I really wanted this…this thing to work out.  I mean, the hot dog really had a point, I had felt something, and yet I didn’t know what to do with that information.  So as I’m holding the hot dog, walking down the street, it says to me:

-Why are you crying?

and I go:

-I don’t know!  I just feel bad!

-Look, Peter, this isn’t supposed to be complicated.  I’m not trying to hurt you or make you feel bad, I just want to have a chance, to…well to give us a chance to just see what happens.

I looked around for a second, suddenly worried that someone would see us talking but I apparently was just lost amongst the crowd.  I suppose I looked normal enough, like maybe I just had one of those hands free headsets.  Also, I’ve found people in cities don’t like to approach strangers crying.  I once was on the train and saw a girl balling her eyes out, like she maybe just got hit by a car, or lost a baby or something, and no one said anything to her.  So I reached out and as I was leaving, gently patted her on the shoulder and said:

-It’s gonna be ok.

And she looked back up at me and smiled.  I guess I was hoping that would happen to me.

I wiped my tears away, and said to the hot dog, maybe we can just keep talking for awhile, at home, and the hot dog said “ok” and I headed down the stairs of the subway platform and got on the train.

It was an excruciatingly long ride to my apartment in Long Island City.  We didn’t talk, but there was a lot of tension.  At one point I saw an older business man, who was probably just really hungry, staring at the hot dog which I had perched on my lap.  Out of no where I suddenly became very jealous, and shifted position, trying to hide the hot dog from his gaze.  I know it sounds irrational, but at the time, with things happening as fast as they were it made sense to me.

By the time we got to my house I was spent.  I realized by this point, I hadn’t really eaten anything all day.  Even though I had a fridge full of food, I couldn’t figure out what was appropriate to eat in front of a hot dog, so I just sat down at the kitchen table and took off my coat.  The room was eerily quiet, and it felt like we were at a standstill, until finally I said:

-Ok.  What if we were going to try this?  How would it even work?

to be continued  on 3.5.10

UPDATE!  Continued here!