Girlfriends

My girlfriends aren’t exactly thrilled with him. They’ve met him a few times, but it’s always ended badly. When he ran into Emma at Bakkus, this dive bar downtown, he punched her in the kidney to show her how effective it was as a self-defense move. She said that she had to lie on the floor until it stopped hurting. When he came home late that night, he was inconsolable. It was supposed to be a joke; he hadn’t realized that she would double over like that. He didn’t mean to hurt her.

Another night, when he bumped into Sigrún at Sirkus, he ended up making her cry. She sent me a text that night, saying she never wanted to see him again and she missed me. But she didn’t tell me what happened between them. I felt really guilty. I’ve been with him so much lately that I’ve completely ignored my own friends. But there are so many things I can’t tell them. If you talk about what happens within a relationship, everything gets tangled, and it’s easy for an outsider to judge—I don’t want them to write him off completely. They don’t know what it’s like to be as in love as I am now.