Story Time:
So there I was, working two jobs at the same time. In one of them I met this woman.
Long story short, after I worked with her on several occasions and managed to figure out if she already had a boyfriend - she had not - I picked up all my courage to ask her, if she wanted to have some coffee after work. She said yes. In fact, I was surprised, that she didn't exploded with laughter right there and that I managed to ask her without swallowing my own tongue. She was totally out of my league. She was world cup soccer, while I felt (back then) like someone who wasn't even sure how to kick the ball straight. I don't want to get into details, but she had these natural bright blue/aquamarine eyes. Also, my self-esteem wasn't the best (to put that lightly) and I needed way too much clearasil for a man of my age. She suggested a café I didn't know and that we meet day after tomorrow. I nodded and actually fist pumped the air after she left. It was the time where you could do that, without feeling like a complete moron.
Two days later, that probably added a few wrinkles to my eyes, since I was smiling like a idiot all the time, I was right on time. The thing was a rather lovely café right next to a river and a park on one side and a cobbled road on the other. I would have returned there, if I hadn't had the feeling that my euros were drained from my wallet, simply by approaching it. She wasn't there, so I sat down, wearing in the best my wardrobe had to offer at that time - which meant that I felt underdressed as I compared myself to the other customers, who wore rather expensive casual.
The entire thing was some sort of meeting point for university students, who had rich parents and who studied something so obscure, they would probably need the continued support of mommy and daddy after they graduated. Back then the term 'hipster' hadn't be coined.
She took her time and twenty minutes felt like three hours, so I checked the menu to swat some time, since I didn't thought of bringing a book or something in case she was late. After I properly memorized the entire thing and calculated that I could survive at least half a week, if I wouldn't order a coffee and some tapas and instead spend that money on groceries, she appeared.
She wore a summer dress. No let me rephrase, she wore
the summer dress, and it had the same color as her eyes. She was wearing it, walking with it, in a way as if she
knew what kind of effect it would have - at least on me. I actually think my heart skipped a beat or several. Before she appeared I actually thought if it would be a good idea to get up and pull her chair back - as I said I was young and stupid back then - but she had already sat down before I was able to collect the broken remnants of my composure and get up.
I don't remember about what we talked exactly, but we went from work related stuff, over general smalltalk and finally went over the more personal questions. My smile probably didn't drop a single second off my face, this was the best day in my life: I was sitting with the most gorgeous woman I've ever met (up to that point) in an expensive café and I made her laugh. I wasn't even thinking if or if not 'you-guys-know-what' could happen, if this kept working out - well if I did, an instantaneous boner would probably flipped the table right there.
It was late summer and it was getting dark. If anything, that was a good sign. I also decided at one point that the game I wanted really to buy, wasn't that important and was about to order some more tapas, but then I asked her, if she wanted to grab something 'real' to eat. She also noticed how late it had become and asked me, if I wanted to come with her to a poetry reading and suggested that I could grab a bite to eat there.
I would've followed that woman to hades and back by that point, even if my favorite kind of art was 80s horror-movies and trance music back then. I offered to pay for both of us, she refused with a smile and we both went a few dozen meters down the road.
The bar was a roofed over back yard, accessible through a gate that reminded me a little bit of the gates of Auswitz, but I was smart enough not to bring that up. If the café had been a proto-hipster hangout, this was proto-hipster-central. Again I felt misplaced and misdressed, even in my best shirt and my funeral-and-marriages-only pants. Some people walked on the stage as we entered, pulled some instruments from sticker-laden cases and started to play freejazz. I hate freejazz, but I didn't mind at that moment. She looked at me expectantly and I asked if she knew which place had the best acoustic, which was apparently the thing she wanted to hear. We found a table somewhere around the middle, with a good view of the stage but a rather bad lighting. The electric lights were out in all places except for the bar, toilets and stages and every table was decorated with a candle lantern.
She ordered a glass of red wine and I think I went with an apple spritzer, it was a longer drive home for me. We continued our discussions and I even had the idea to steer the conversation towards books, there was a poetry slam about to happen and I was (and still am) a bit of a book nerd. While she preferred travelogues, I was more (and still am) the SciFi and Fantasy guy. I did my best not to geek out to much about Dan Simmons or Isaac Asimov, but instead pushed the philosophical aspect. After close to an hour, the dissonances on the stage ended a waiter appeared to set up a blackboard. He put it down somewhere on the left of the stage and it displayed the title of the poetry reading that was about to happen:
"The Vagina of Eva Braun"
I should have run. I should have run fast. Faking some sort of intestinal emergency, claming that one of the tapas earlier had went bad. But I didn't. After she even put down "Hyperion" and "Foundation series" into her little notebook, I was ready to kill for her. Minutes later I remembered that I was hungry and waving for a waiter, while still keeping cynic thoughts along the lines of "Yeah, Eva Braun was kind of a cunt" away from my tongue, when she bumped her elbow into my side. I actually twitched, not expecting that and she gave me a look. She pointed towards the stage and mentioned, that she totally forgot to tell me that this was a childhood friend of hers. I haven't even noticed that the reading was about to begin. The person on the stage smiled towards us and the woman on my left waved back at her. Again, I won't get into details, but while the woman next to me was ...well, I already gushed enough... that person on the stage seemed to be able to divide an apple in multiple slices - with only one bite.
Thankfully I already suppressed the most of the following events, so my account might be not entirely accurate:
She started her reading with a scream, raising two raw eggs into the air, presented them to the audience to show that each of them had a venus symbol drawn on it. She lowered them - still screaming - to the height where here ovaries were and crushed them in her hands.
Egg white and yellow dribbled onto a plastic wrapping that covered the stage and the female person said something along the lines: "This is the pain women feel." and then produced another pair of eggs, each one painted with a Mars symbol. You might guess on which height she crushed them, although they were 'blown out' and empty. The next sentence was something along the lines: "This is the male oppression." I don't remember the poem that followed, but it contained at least two times the word 'ovaries' (which sounds in german even stupider). After the person on the stage finished her first barely-rhyming poem some idiots in the audience clapped politely, I did too, as the hands of the woman of my dreams moved, mine did too.
The following thirty minutes or so saw the person on the stage, singing feminist themed songs while playing a acoustic guitar (I admit that she could play), the slaughter of several perfectly fine pre-breakfast eggs and her talking nonsensical bullshit, while lighting her face from below, as if she was telling a campfire story - including another wasted pre-fried egg. Each time she made a break the people applauded for some reason - and I did too, of course - but the applause became shorter and quieter each time, except when she was finally done with her act. I guess the audience was just relieved that 'it' was over.
The person cleaned her hands for the n-th time and walked over to us. She hugged the woman to my left and probably created a area of perfect blandness between the both of them. The female person sat down and reached out with her hand to me, as if she expected me to kiss her papal ring or something. I shook it and I would probably have even shook it, if I hadn't been slightly disturbed by her presentation. The look in her eyes was that of utter contempt and I am still not sure if the reason was the handshake, or me having balls.
We were introduced properly and about two minutes later the ranting began. The person ordered some cocktail and then started off with the question, what I thought about her performance. I tried my best to say nothing at all as words came out of my mouth. I remember that I mentioned, that it wasn't something I had expected, that I usually do not attend to poetry readings and have really no idea how to judge this, but she quickly steered the conversation into a direction where she could say words like 'patriarchy', 'feminism' and 'oppression'.
I nodded, smiled and nodded again, my contributions to her rant being mostly "Yes...", "Well...", "But..." and full questions that made me feel like an idiot after I said them. The person swallowed her cocktail, ordered a new one and continued with her sperg about the evil of malekind. The woman to my left smiled, but in retrospect I think she felt as shitty as I did, although for other reasons. I felt helpless and was nearly about to cry in that situation, but I did my best to hide it. I am still not sure how I managed. I didn't want to agree at everything that creature said - I even had my pride back then - nor did I either had the mental capacity or the courage to call her out on her bullshit. Of course, I also would not have dared to argue with a childhood friend of the women next to me. I felt cornered, steamrolled and at a loss for words, like a punching bag for her feminist rage.
After half of an eternity the person steamed off with her second or third drink to probably ruin someone else's day.
The woman in the blue summer dress and I left the bar. I felt like shit. But then she apologized.
I was confused and asked her why. She told me that she should have seen 'that' coming and that it was her fault, because she brought me there. I didn't know what to say, she smiled at me I dreamed of a hug, but it stayed a dream. I drove her home in the shitty french compact car I owned back then, and as she got out she mentioned that she needed to be up in a five hours and needed the sleep. I nodded, said goodbye and drove off.
...I woke up at 5 in the morning, nearly bumping my head at the slope of the roof as I idiot realized to what she had alluded to.
We met three more times. It was wonderful, but as I was making a move she told me that she had been green-lighted for a semester abroad, Canada. I tried to get back in contact with her, but due to reasons we never met again.
Life is shit sometimes. *glimpses to his left* ...but not always.
