treat me like i need to be treated

It wasn't as much of a shock to wake in her bed, as it was to wake in her bed and realize, for the first time, that, with bleary morning eyes and soft morning whimpers, that she's startling. Her dirty blonde hair was messy around her perfect face. Gorgeous. I had never noticed. The obtuse social tide of Tampa had always kept us from even a good conversation at a drunk bar, much less a great one in the morning, in her bed, which folded out, far into her tiny living room.

She'd always been cold to me in public. And though I'd always assumed it was an inadvertent product of the Tampa social structure (this place breeds social awkwardness - you could sit in a crowded Tampa bar for 6 hours straight and there's a good possibility that not one person would talk to you the entire evening - a lot of us have molded ourselves to that) I had written her off. But she casually wrapped around me in the morning with the sharp but pleasant smell of hard liquor coming from her smile. And she was smiling. And when she turned over on her side and offered me her back, she was laughing giddy too, and I swore it meant she was happy to have me there. And after three, hungover hours with her it was clear that Tampa has been beating her good side down; she just needs to be treated better.

The night before, her and her friends had come back to The Friendship Garden to smoke dope. When the topic turned to 'What are you doing back in Tampa?' and, in the explanation process, I admitted I had no place to stay, she invited me to partake in her sleeper sofa.

Her friends passed the pipe around as, directly across the moonlit table from me, she expounded upon the virtues of her comfortable sleeper sofa, and ended the testimonial with, "I don't have a bed, so I sleep on the sofa as well."

It sounded promising. But when we were alone and she'd changed into her sleep clothes and crawled in next to me, nothing happened. The farthest it strayed from innocence was when, in the early morning course of sleeping against each other, I woke up holding her soft shoulder, and when I walked my fingers down her arm, to the crook inside the elbow, and across the bridge of her forearm, to her wrist, I found her hand down her pajama bottoms, resting on the mound of her vagina. When I felt hair, I pulled my hand out, and rested it back on her shoulder and tried to go back to sleep, but I was too comfortable to sleep.

Eventually the sun came out and she still hadn't complained about my humming. The room was full of light and so I studied the curves under her cotton pajamas, her still closed eyes, her bookshelves crammed with great books, her brilliant record collection, and her face, which I'd never given full credit.

When she awoke she was happier than I'd ever seen her at so many bars. She talked in sleepy but intelligent tangents and somewhere in it all I felt innocence, which, though not as intense or affecting, seems as rare as love. And I was glad she hadn't let me fuck her. Cause if she had, I would have left before she ever got around to showing me her book collection. And that was a great thing. I hadn't studied a white girl in two months, and it felt like a gift when she pulled her wonderful body from under the covers and stuck her thin legs straight into the air to scratch at mosquito bites. It was the nicest I'd felt in months.

Over the course of three hours we laughed a lot and talked about smart stuff and she let me kiss her three more times, though not deeply. There was indeed innocence and simplicity, which, since Costa Rica, has become my new ideal of beauty. So, with her hand in my hair, and my back sinking into her sleeper sofa, I asked her on a traditional date, for tonight, and she said yes without pause for thought.

I cannot stress how strange this was in the context of my pre-conceived notions of the woman. But in her bed with our bad hangover breath, everything was different suddenly. Suddenly there was all this soul. And I was interested in it, so much so that all my instincts were suppressed; I didn't want to just add her to the small, feeble tally of meaningless events. I wanted to listen to her talk, take her to a movie, hold her skinny arms, make her laugh, and treat her better than the rest of these Tampa dummies have.

These Tampa dummies, cramped into their small, frustrated equation, have labeled her maliciously. And though I never paid much attention, I'm sure it helped me write her off. But today, after that soulful morning, I announced to a few of my Tampa dummy friends, that I was going on a date with her, and then spent the afternoon defending this woman I didn't really know.

"How many people have added their opinions to my social files?" I asked my friends, then answered before they had the chance: "Tons." I said. "And most of them are wrong. So, I don't give a shit what anyone says about her, I'm going to form my own opinion. And so far, in my opinion, she is a sweet, very smart girl who is misrepresented and forced into awkwardness by people like y'all."

But before we made our date, I had agreed to work as a temp at PIZZA DIVE tonight as well. Since I don't have a car, I'd ridden my bike there last night to say hello to the kitchen staff; impress them with my new Spanish.

The back door of the restaurant was open and no one was around so I rode my bike into PIZZA DIVE, through the room where they store the dry pasta and straws, into the middle room where they prep the food.

When I rolled into the kitchen on my bicycle, everyone yelled "Malaka!" at once and within five minutes I'd agreed to come back to work for a few days during my layover in Tampa.

I was happy to be back on the job tonight, but still anxious to get through it, so she could come pick my car-less ass up, and we could go out into the dumb Tampa night and laugh and treat each other like the humans that stupid Tampa won't let us be.

But somewhere amid the Spanish, Greek and laughter of the PIZZA DIVE kitchen staff, she called me. I heard cancellation in her voice.

"I've been seeing this 19-year-old guy," She told me. "I'm gonna go out with him tonight and cultivate that."

I pretended not to mind. Like I couldn't possibly put time aside to care when there was still all this work to do; mop the floors and refill the salt and pepper and sugar containers and fold stacks of pizza boxes; all of this needed to be done before I even thought about what I'd do after work.

Tony stood next to me at the counter, taking money and bitching at me, "Malaka, get off the phone!"

"Right, right, cool, cool. It's cool," I told her. "It's fine." And I even smiled when I said it. And then I hung up the phone before I accidentally admitted that I'd really been looking forward to seeing her, and that I'd always loved that word: cultivate.