Carpet Cleaning

The party had finally started to wind down around 2:30, and by 3am I had shut the door on the last straggler. My roommate was grabbing blankets for his out of town friends or clearing a place for their sleeping bags, and my girlfriend, G---, had just a few minutes before gone to my room to get ready for bed. I said goodnight to my roommate and his guests, then shut the door of my bedroom behind me.

She was lying on the bed, curled up in a ball and facing away from the door.

“You asleep already?” I asked. She just shook her head quickly, not looking in my direction. Shit. I could tell she was livid. I had seen this body language before, and even if I hadn't – she didn't exactly need a translator when she got like this.

I don't remember how long it took for me to get it out of her that she was mad at me because “she couldn't trust someone who would talk about her behind her back.” That wasn't what I was expecting. A few minutes before she had gone into my bedroom happy and buzzed. How could she have possibly gotten this mad this fast?

Thank you, internet. This was before I stopped using instant messenger, and indeed this is part of why I stopped using instant messenger. Earlier that evening I had left my friend S--- a response to some conversation we were having via IM-tag. She would leave me a message while I was away, and then I would respond while she was away, and the cycle would keep going. I don't think the conversation we were having had anything to do with my girlfriend, but of course G--- was curious and decided to read the backlogs for S---'s screenname.

They had met about a month earlier, over winter break. I was crazy about G---. She had never met S---, and I was eager for them to like eachother. A few days before, I had had an IM conversation with S---, saying something along the lines of “I really like this girl, but sometimes she's kind of reserved around new people; please give her a chance.” This was apparently one of the last online conversations I had had with S---, and therefore one of the first to show up in the chat log when my girlfriend decided to play private eye.

Not much of the ensuing fight remains in my memory. I do remember it getting to the point where I said that since she wouldn't get out of my apartment then I would. I grabbed my coat from the hall closet, nimbly dodged some sleeping bodies, and was out in the hall with the door locked before she could stop me.

I must have walked for two hours and ignored 14 phone calls. Ignored 14. A few calls I actually picked up, and aside from telling her to leave my home, I'm sure I said things to deserve being yelled at, but my response was to just hang up because I couldn't deal with her. Finally, in a sobbing voice mail, G--- told me that I could come back because she had gone home. I walked back to my apartment, unlocked the door, and went in. Oops. Unlocking the deadbolt was so automatic for me that I didn't realize my mistake until it was too late.

The fight continued for who knows how long. I tried to leave again, but she grabbed my arm and I ended up dragging her outside. I started to walk away across the parking lot, but she sprinted after me and held on.

I think it finally ended because we were both just too tired to fight anymore. It could have been that I just gave up because I couldn't take it. For some reason we went to her apartment to go to bed, and in the morning we both went back to my apartment to help my roommate clean up. One of our friends had thrown up at the foot of his bed, so we had to rent a carpet cleaner. We figured as long as we had the cleaner we might as well do the entire apartment. The carpet was never cleaner the entire time we lived in that apartment, including when we moved in.