It was true, tacos were my favorite that is - until he ruined it. I knew it was going to happen at one point or another, sooner than later. A beautiful disaster. I saw a video of an exploding taco one day online. Seriously. A taco with a firecracker, I kid you not. Anyway, that’s what my heart felt like: an exploding taco. Why? Well, that just happened to be what I was about to crunch into when he decide to end it.
The last bite is always the best, I don’t know why. It just is. I never made it to that “real” last bite. My last bite was unplanned, unexpected, just like the event that coincided with it. It left a bitter taste in my mouth. Was it the not-quite-ripened tomatoes or the emotional flatness in his voice.
“Good, huh?” he said after long silences in between awkward smiles and giant bites.
“Yeah” I replied “You seem quiet today… thinking or just quiet.”
Crunch. He looked up at me, “Thinking, but I want to wait.”
Letting his last comment go in one ear and right out the other I opened another packet of hot sauce for my dry taco. Unaware of what was going on in that head of his, I was still calm and took another bite.
“You seem very unhappy lately” he said. Chomp, chomp, chomp. “And I’ve been thinking that maybe we weren’t meant for each other, you ever think that?”
I gulped and that half chewed tortilla of corn scraped my insides as I swallowed. Maybe I felt like that as a product of his words. This was the last meal I would be sharing with him.
I forced up a few words that would make me seem indifferent, unaffected. “Yeah, I don’t know… guess I’ve been thinking about that too”.
The waiter came back to the table and asked to refill our glasses. That cleared my mind for a moment. I looked up at the waiter and smiled, thinking to myself “Just go with it”. Now, glancing back at the boy who once made me think about the “what if’s” I was stuck. He made some kind of instant transformation. Already he was different: unusually self-confident, outspoken, unattractive. The boy who ruined my “last bite”.
Whatever though, I guess tacos aren’t the healthiest thing to be eating all the time. He left a burning pain that ran through my insides. I was hot in every sense of the word.
“Uhuh, we should just be friends” I said. I wasn’t full, but I sure felt like I was.
