It Doesn't Take Much

He got to me again today.

God, it doesn't take much: 3 cell phone calls (1:43pm, 1:45pm, and 1:46pm). I finally picked up that last one, and in 1 minute and 24 seconds felt anxious, gulity, harassed, scared...

He was supposed to pick up the car at 2:30.

I'm at lunch with my boyfriend. A great lunch--romantic, sweet. He slides out of the car while Ogre is talking to me for 1 min, 24 seconds. I drive toward work. I get to work, and Ogre is standing in front of a parking spot, at the front door of my workplace.

He's scowling.

As I open the door, he comes right up to it. I put my head down, and wouldn't even know I did it except in my memory, the top part of my vision only goes up to the bottom of the window, with the corner of the window filled by red jacket.

Why am I holding the door so it doesn't hit him? I wish I could just hit him. I should bash him with it, yell, "Get out of my way!" but I don't. He wouldn't think twice of doing either of those things to me.

Instead, I slither out, feeling guilty, looking guilty. I barely open the door, not even allowing myself the permission of moving freely, not even giving myself the basic human worth of space. I hurry toward the door of work, toward escape.

"By the way," he says, and what I hear is, "I'm about to tell you something that you'd know already if you weren't so obtuse..."

"I put gas in the car last weekend," he says to me.

Do you want a cookie? I say to myself, and feel guilty. "I put $20 or $30 in it this week," I say. Why am I explaining myself?

I scurry inside.

When I get to my desk, a message.

It isn't much. The whole encounter isn't much. But it isn't in the encounter, or even the activities themselves, it's in the positioning. He had the power. I was the victim.

Again.