I wanted to go somewhere for spring break, traveling is absolutely my favorite thing to do, and my friends had bailed on me, so Mr. Almost-Perfect had the initial idea what we go somewhere together. He was on a super tight budget, and wanted to go camping- and I mean for real outdoors, just us and our tent- and my ultimate goal is to see everything (and not get eaten alive in the process, though indoor plumbing is always a plus as well), so somehow we came up with the idea to go to Gatlinburg. We could go hiking (and he wanted to go fishing), all while staying at a cabin complete with hot tub. We decided to go just for a long weekend, and I had been really looking forward to it, though the week prior to us going, I had confided in my new BFF and ex-boyfriend, The Dentist, that I would probably have more fun if he was going instead of Mr. A-P. The Dentist pointed out that at least I would probably know after our weekend whether we would be together for the long haul (and he was strongly voting no).
So Mr. Almost-Perfect came over late Wednesday night after packing, and our plan was to be up and out the door at 8am. The next morning, I got up at 7 to get ready, and woke him up at 7:30. And then again at 8:00. And then again at 8:15…. Finally he got up and we were on the road, though a bit later than planned. I drove, because it was my car, and less than an hour into the drive, he started complaining because he needed coffee. I had made coffee before we left, but he didn’t get any. So we stopped to get him some coffee. “So much better now, I’ll be much better company”. Half an hour later, he was asleep. I drove almost 3 hours while he slept, and when my eyes started getting droopy, I asked him to please get up and keep me company. “I’m tired, I didn’t get to sleep in like I usually get to”, he told me. Oh yeah, have I mentioned that he gets up for work at 9:30am? I’m done teaching 3 classes by then, not that I minded, though I really got annoyed that he always complained about how busy he was all the time- get up earlier I wanted to scream! So he was tired and cranky, and soon started to complain about my music, (he hates the Beatles- my favorite band) and my driving. He kept saying he wanted to drive, so at lunch, I let him, figuring this would make him happier. I suggested we play a road-trip game- “I hate those kind of games” he said, so I played the alphabet game alone, and he complained about how annoying I was being. I was guessing my tambourine (that I had bought for a road trip with my best friend the year before- and man we had loved it!) was out of the question. Mr. A-P would hardly talk to me, so I pulled out my iPad and pulled up a conversation-starter app I had on it. I asked him a couple things, but most of his answers were short, or he wouldn’t answer because the question was too dumb. The next question asked what celebrities we had met. So I told him how I had sat next to Dave Chappelle on a plane, and started to tell him about when I met Jared Leto while working at Banana Republic, only to get cut off by him telling me that he didn’t care about this sort of thing. “Well, it’s an interesting story about my life, I would think you would want to hear it”, I said. “What’s it have to do with me”, he responded, “I just don’t value celebrities, I don’t want to talk about it. Though, I do think it was funny when Michelle (you remember, his phenom bff) met ___ and didn’t even know who he was”. REALLY!? You cut me off on my story, but want to talk about Michelle’s celebrity encounter. It hurt me, so I quit talking for a while, it seemed pointless to talk when I got cut off or told my topics were stupid. We were almost done with the driving portion of our trip anyways, reaching Pigeon Forge, and also tons of traffic. So we decided to stop at Kroger to get our food for the trip. I had paid for the cabin, with the agreement that Mr. A-P would pay for the gas, food and everything else on the trip, and we had stayed up the night before to decide on our grocery list, but when we walked in, he no longer wanted any of the food we had decided on, only wanting to get bread and bologna. I was so annoyed at this point, and wondering what I had gotten myself into, I just wanted to get out of there and get to the cabin and relax. I was being quiet, but not arguing with him, so I was really thrown off when Mr. A-P said to me, loudly, in the store “you’re really acting like a bitch”. I didn’t know what to say in response, I was in shock, so I just walked to the car, and cried. At that moment, I didn’t even want to go the ½ hour to the cabin, I just wanted to be home. It was a quiet drive to the cabin, until we first drove into the Smokies, and then we were so excited by its beauty that our silence was broken. And when we saw our cabin, we were excited again, it was so charming and rustic, so we immediately got into our bathing suits and into the hot tub. And that was it, we never talked about the road trip or the Kroger incident, and I just chalked it up to Mr. A-P being a bit grumpy and not the best on long car roads.
So we had a decent evening, but the next morning, on a day when we had planned to do the most strenuous hike we could find, I couldn’t get Mr. Almost-Perfect out of bed. Finally around 11 he got out of bed, and I headed into the kitchen to make coffee, but he didn’t like how I was going to make the coffee, and that, with the fact that he didn’t think I would be able to hike as well as he and was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up since I didn’t have the correct hiking gear, started another argument. I ignored it again, and we went out our hike and had an amazing day. We barely reached the top of the summit by 6:00pm, but we made it, and had two hours to make it back down the mountain before sundown. It had taken us four hours to get to the top, so we had to run down the mountain (while stopping to slow down where there was snow and ice), but I am very proud to say that I was way ahead of Mr. A-P the whole way down. When we reached the bottom, the sun had set, but we felt so euphoric we were definitely on a high. Though I could tell my legs were going to kill the next day, especially after running down, stepping on or leaping over tree roots and stones, but it was an amazing day. The Smokies are beautiful!
scaling the cliff- should I have pushed him over?
The next day, sleepy head couldn’t get out of bed again much before noon, and he wanted to hike and fish that day. He wanted to stop at an outdoors store to get bait, but when we got there, on the other side of Gatlinburg and close to the park entrance, we found out they didn’t sell bait there, and the bait store was back by our cabin. I didn’t want to go back, we had artificial bait, but Mr. Almost-Perfect was insistent. I just wanted to get started on our day, but we had to drive back through the busy, pedestrian filled Gatlinburg traffic. We were in the car, Mr. A-P driving, and I got annoyed by the pedestrians just running in front of our car when we had a green arrow, and in saying so I got the response from Mr. A-P- “Shut up! You’re annoying me!” There it was, twice in one weekend where I was verbally accousted by my boyfriend, who talked about our future so freely when we first started dating, but how could I keep dating someone who talked to me like that? If he did it now, three months into us dating, it would surely get worse. So after a day of hiking, and watching Mr. A-P fish, I went to bed with that exact thought, because not once had he apologized. Maybe if he had said ‘hey, I was wrong, sorry about that’, I wouldn’t have done it, but I woke up Sunday morning, the day we were supposed to leave, and told him I wanted to break up. He was surprised, and we ended up having a long talk. I told him what was bothering me, him being mean and selfish, and he told me he was afraid of letting me get too close after my freak outs. So, once again we decided to stay together, but really work harder at not doing the things we had mentioned. And I felt really good, confident, and he seemed different immediately. So we decided to make the most of our last day of vacation, and spent the whole day in the Smokies and exploring Gatlinburg. We didn’t even drive home until 6pm, and arrived back in Columbus late, but it was a more enjoyable ride home (though he still didn’t want to play road games, and also told me I couldn’t dance in the car because it was embarrassing).
We didn’t see each other the next week, and once again we couldn’t seem to get our schedules to match up. He wanted to see me Thursday, when I had plans with a friend, and wasn’t happy that I wasn’t available. He sent me a semi-nasty text about things not working well between us, and that was it, my breaking point. I texted him back and told him we could just forget about the whole thing then, and proceeded to go have drinks with my dear friend. And when I talked about Mr. Almost-Perfect to her, I realized I didn’t even feel very sad about it; I was also having a hard time thinking about what I did like about him, besides our good chemistry (darn that chemistry- I’m started to rethink my feelings on the importance of it, it keeps leaving me astray!). But again, Mr. A-P was taken aback by my being upset, and asked me to come over, so I did later that evening. Going over didn’t help things, and after talking and getting nowhere (he told me he didn’t want to break up, just maybe take a break- but I think that’s a dumb concept for people who had barely dated at all, and told him so) I started leafing through the pictures he had printed of our Tennessee trip. He had bought a camera and used it a lot, just for our trip but when I started looking through the pictures I noticed that he didn’t have a single one of me, and when I pointed this out (and I promise, I said it in a calm voice) he got really mad and shouted at me “Get the f*** out of my house!”. I was speechless (thought I’m not sure why I was surprised, after everything else), but did just that without a word- though he must have been stunned at my leaving (I was just following his request), because he went to the door and watched me pull away, and texted me several times before I arrived back home. “This is bad” he texted- you think?
The next day, I had received several texts from Mr. A-P throughout the day, but that become much less important to me when I got a message from my principal telling me she needed to see me before the end of the day. That’s when I found out- my position was cut for the next year. Needless to say, I was stunned and not happy, so when Mr. Almost-Perfect texted me saying “just run away from your problems like usual”, I told him what was going on. A big part of me thought this would be something that would make him come running to comfort me, and maybe bring us closer. Instead, I got a bunch of snarky, unsympathetic texts from him, and when I asked him why he couldn’t just be sweet to me, he responded “well, did you even ask about my day?”. I didn’t hear from him the rest of the evening, I found out later that he was buying a kayak- much more important than being there for me. But before you feel too bad for me- the good thing that came out of this whole loss of boyfriend and job situation was, I realized very quickly that it’s absolutely no loss that I am no longer going to be with Mr. A-P, he’s not the type of person that I want to be with at all. In a move that is very unlike me, I don’t even want to be friends with him. Throughout this all, my true friends have totally been there for me, even more than I could imagine. Maybe I need to take a few of their advice, and let them start picking the guys for me, could they help me find someone who wants to be Catching Katie?
