World’s Worst Girlfriend

It was a beautiful ceremony but a terrible reception. And I was stuck at the worst table in the room, sitting across from the worst couple in the world. A real match made in Hell. They were in the middle of some sort of fight. She was mad at him. Really mad. Furious actually. But he didn’t know why. Poor guy kept sheepishly asking her what was wrong. Eventually she told him. Apparently she was mad at him because he’d said something horribly hurtful the night before. At dinner.

He stared at her with the doe eyes of an innocent man. He really didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about. Seriously, if you looked up “WTF?” in the dictionary, there’d be a picture of this dude’s face. Didn’t last though. Second or two later, color in the dude’s face went from Scared-Rabbit White to Righteously-Indignant Red. Guy was so mad he was shaking. Could barely speak. He reminded her that he was on a plane last night. That they didn’t talk last night. That he’d been back home for a funeral. His grandmother’s funeral.

Took awhile, but eventually she realized that she wasn’t remembering something that actually happened, something he actually said; she was remembering something he’d said to her last night in a dream. Did she apologize? Nope. She doubled down. Said the dream spoke to a deeper truth about their relationship even if it wasn’t factually true.

—John Faithful Hamer, Love is Not a Liquid Asset (2020)