This Whole Thing Is Actually A Prompt

I think I wrote a short story about this once but I only have 10 minutes so I’m not going to go looking for that and posting it here. Plus I think previously written stuff is probably cheating since it doesn’t exactly get the creative juices flowing.

I arranged to meet an illicit partner (can you be an illicit partner, I suppose you can) at a particular bar on a particular corner in a particular section of NYC. I waited with my modest but expensive drink for over an hour before he finally showed up. We’ll never know if I told him the wrong corner or if he wasn’t listening or if he was lying or if I’m plain old crazy but he claimed that he’d been waiting just a block away for just the same amount of time. I know him, I know him so well, he may have been waiting some time but I’m sure it was less time than I was waiting because he is notoriously late to everything.

So he arrived and he joked a little with an “is this seat taken” sort of vibe and I ran with it. I pretended I’d never met him and I was being stood up by some ass and would love for someone to buy me a drink. He wobbled. Then he rallied and we had, in essence, the whole argument about who should have been where when but we had it in the characters of these 2 other people once removed from the problem. It was both bizarre and marvelous at the same time. I was mad, so mad, but I didn’t want to be all mad and crazy at him. Illicit, remember, we didn’t get that much time together and when confronted with mad he goes immediately to threat level LAWYER and I never win an argument against that. This way, though, we hashed it all out. Finally, when he was exhausted from playing things my way, the role playing way, we grabbed our things and left. We left, the real people and we talked about how we were mad and sorry and starving. Then we kissed and got some dinner.

I think sometimes that I don’t argue well. I do actually but I know a lot of people with a lot more experience at it. I do, however, argue more creatively than most and when I know enough to work that to my advantage I am unstoppable. I learned a lot from that guy, some really hard lessons, too, but the most useful ones have been about how to stand up for myself and still get a kiss and some dinner.