Read Online Even Though I Don't Miss You by Chelsea Martin - Free Book Online

At a bar, you touched my knee repeatedly.
    I happen to believe that people outside of myself can't incite feelings in me, that the feelings I am capable of feeling are the ones that I will feel when my body finds that it is the time to feel them, regardless of who happens to be near or against me at the time.
    The touching seemed to be accidental at first, a very slight touch with the back of your hand during dramatic gesturing during climactic points in our conversation. We were drinking whiskey.
    I said, "Happiness is my new favorite thing to talk about because it makes me feel horrible."
    We talked about the different ways happiness is portrayed in books and movies. Finding happiness, losing happiness, cultivating happiness.
    You said, "Happiness is so nice that it almost makes life worth living."
    My friend Megan was talking to your less attractive friend. She had started drinking before we went out so that she would have the courage to appear composed and confident in front of you, but ended up talking to your less attractive friend and looking a little sad and drunk.
    I attempted to make a non-pathetic and non-convoluted smile for Megan but a pathetic and convoluted one was all I could come up with. She didn't look at me and I thought maybe I shouldn't've smiled at all.
    You made constant eye contact as you talked to me and your eyes were both too close together and too close to my eyes, which are having trouble figuring out what to look at.
    Everything I said to you was so funny that I didn't want to stop talking to you and miss any of the funny things that might come out of me.
    It is something to consider, if we're making a list things to consider, that most relationships are mirrors of yourself, and that those who you choose to be around is largely dependant on what you want to see in yourself at that time. There wasn't even enough time to say all the funny things I was thinking of, so I began excitedly typing them into my phone.
    You said, "Who are you texting?"
    I said, "I'm not texting."
    You said, "I have the confidence to talk to you about happiness because I am drunk and because you gave me a nickname earlier today."
    I said, "What was the nickname?"
    You answered, or began to answer, but I couldn't hear the answer over the increasing volume of the bar noise.
    You said, "Do you have a lot of ex-boyfriends?"
    And I said, "No."
    You said, "Do you stalk them on the internet?"
    "No."
    You said, "Yes you do. Everyone does."
    I said, "I don't."
    You said, "You don't go on their Facebook pages and stalk them?"
    And I said, "I've been to their Facebook pages but not very often."
    You said, "Yes you do. Everyone does."
    And I said, "No, I don't. You're projecting."
    And you said, "I'll admit it. I stalk my ex-girlfriends on Facebook. Everyone does it. I'll admit I do it."
    I felt this compassion for you suddenly, which isn't something I feel a lot. I imagined you alone in your apartment, masturbating and trying to write an online dating profile based on the clues about yourself you think you've found on your ex-girlfriends' Facebook pages.
    I said, "I don't know. I don't think so."
    At the bar, I ordered another whiskey, even though I wanted beer, because I had told everybody that I was gluten-free and we had this whole conversation about how I couldn't drink beer. My stupid whiskey came and I stupid drank it.
    "I wrote a story," you said, in a tone that indicated to me that you thought you had revealed something intimate about yourself.
    If we were actors I think the camera would zoom in a little to appreciate the calculated tempo of my eyes as they shift from Point A (the top of your left shoulder) to Point B (your left eyebrow) to Point C (a hair on your chin) to Point D (a freckle on your cheek).
    Megan and I had been on her porch earlier, sharing nostalgia for when we were teenagers, for when we lived together and shared everything, yelled goodnight to each other from our rooms on opposite sides of the apartment,