The Catalyst

The next two weeks or so went by much the same as they had. He'd yell at me, and whine, about some small thing or other, I'd continue to clean up small messes and keep the house generally tidy. My room, though, was still a mess.

Then, in the middle of May, I got the clean bug. My blog, and my vow, had finally sunk in. I made a goal for myself, and in order to fulfill that goal of staying clean, I needed to just do it.

For a week, I did nothing but clean. In all my free time, I was cleaning. Each afternoon was dedicated to a different room. The living room and kitchen, the front room, the media room, the garage, and my bathroom.

I was tedious and meticulous. Vacuuming, sweeping, dusting, spraying, wiping, disinfecting, washing, and organizing. Even days when I came home completely exhausted from work, and wanted nothing more than to take a nap, I would spend 2-3 hours each afternoon cleaning each individual room. I was dreadfully tired, since I still had a bad habit of going to bed at 2-3am, but this was important to me, and I needed to see it through. And to be completely honest, I very much enjoyed it. I'd see the end result and proudly tell myself, "Yeah. I did that."

Thursday of that week came around, and I decided I would clean the garage.

But before I get to that, I need to mention the night before. We have a whiteboard that I brought over, and we've both started writing things down that, whoever goes shopping next, should get from the store. I wrote that we needed Raid, since we were out of it from the last time we needed it.

Mikey came into my room and whined, "Why the fuck do we need more Raid?"

"Because we're out," I responded.

"Well goddammit! How much of it did you use?"

"Apparently we used all of it. We had a lot of ants and spiders around."

He walked away still yelling and cursing, apparently in disbelief that the Raid was gone. What's the big deal, man?! The cans of Raid cost $4 down at Save Mart. Going out and buying a new can is no big deal. And it certainly isn't something you need to whine to me about.

I wrote down the need for Raid because I found a black widow in the garage (but left it alone). In addition to that, Mikey had placed his golf clubs on my side of the garage, and I nearly ran them over. I looked at the state of the garage in its entirety and decided I wasn't happy with how disheveled it looked. So I decided to clean it the next day.

The date is now May 28, 2009.

I emptied out the whole garage and swept it. Then I sprayed down all the walls with Raid (and totally shit-killed that black widow along with its eggs!), and began rearranging everything. Then it came time to do something with the massive amounts of trash bags full of aluminum cans that were out there. Mikey, when we first moved in, decided he wanted to save any and all aluminum cans we used in the house and go recycle them for money to take off of rent. This was 3 months worth of cans stacked, approximately 3 feet high and 4 feet wide. A massive amount of trash bags I honestly didn't want to look at anymore.

Mikey was at work and I sent him a text that said, "Hey, is anything happening with these cans? I know you said you wanted to get money for them. Is that still happening? If not, the recycling goes to the curb tomorrow and I'll put them out with it."

He never responded to this.

However, about 20 minutes later, I saw he posted a tweet on Twitter. And I sent him another text saying, "Also, I moved your golf clubs to your side of the garage. I almost ran them over last night back in the garage and I'd rather not run the risk of hitting them and having to buy you new ones."

He immediately responded to this saying, "It should be flush with the lawnmower. Put it back please."

I told myself, okay fine. He has a problem with that. I'll put them back for now, and we'll talk about it when he gets home.

Like I said, though, he never responded to the text about the cans. Midnight came around (approximately 9 hours later), so I told myself, "Hey, he had time to respond to the issue of the golf clubs immediately, and he had time to post a useless tweet. So the cans must not be important. I decided to put them in the recycle bin to be picked up in the morning.

1:38am rolls around. I hear the garage door open. I thought this was particularly weird since Mikey gets off work at 1:30, and he never gets home until sometime between 1:45 and 2. Instead, it took him 8 minutes to get home. Immediately, I hear him roll the recycle bin up to the garage. Then I heard this loud BANG!

I became concerned because based on the time, I thought there was a chance this wasn't Mikey. And I was hearing noises I never heard before. I cracked the door to the garage open and peeked out. The bang that I heard had come from the large lid of the recycle bin being slammed onto the trunk of my car. I saw Mikey digging through the recycle bin digging the bags of aluminum cans out of it.

I went back to my room, turned the light off and sat on my computer.

Then I heard a loud knock. Actually, it was not a knock. It sounded more like he punched my door. Literally a split second later, without even waiting for an answer from me, he barged into my room and yells, "WE NEED TO TALK!"

Two minutes later we are out at the dining room table. He has a beer in hand and he is lecturing me.

"I can understand you wanting everything to have a place. But it's not up to you to decide where EVERYTHING in this house goes. I'm worried because this is just going to become another thing in your life that you get all gung-ho about, go whole-hog into it and then get burnt out from it. Like the 30 day challenge. Like you always do!"

Mikey ranted on and on. Without acknowledging much of what he said, I nodded and shrugged him off . It was 1:45 in the morning and it was not the time to be talking about this bullshit. He came home angry. He came home in a bad mood. And I'm rightly certain he came home EXPECTING to be mad about the cans. But here's the thing. I gave him plenty of notice. All he had to do was respond to me saying that he was still going to do something with them. He had time to text other things to me and other people, so I assumed the cans weren't important to him. And I told him what I was going to do if nothing was going to be done with them. He hd no right to be angry about that.

Most importantly, I was legitimately afraid of him that night. I had been having the vibe that this is his house and I'm just a guest in it for a long time. But with him sitting there, in a ratty old t-shirt, drinking a beer, yelling at me for insignificant things reminded me of a bad alcoholic husband getting ready to beat his wife (yes, in this analogy I am a woman and Mikey and I are married. Deal with it.) I had all these thoughts in my head. All these issues I was having with him that I wanted to call him out on. Rebuttals to his accusations toward me. But I went blank. I forgot them all. And when I tried to say something, I just wound up stuttering and stammering incomprehensibly. So I just said, "Okay" and went to bed.

We haven't talked about that night, the cans, or the golf clubs ever since then. And that's the way it is. The next day he, again, acted completely normal towards me. As if nothing happened.

Two days later, I actually did run over the golf clubs.