The phone rang. It was him again, but I knew that before I picked up the phone. He always called this time of night. He was crying about how much he missed me. Told me he wished he could visit. He blamed me for his lack of sleep. “I just don’t know what to do anymore!” he screamed through the digital magic of his cell phone. I looked around the room, anxious to say something to fill the silence. I mustered up a brief apology before my eyes settled on my sport bottle of Poland Spring water and I noticed the expiration date for the first time. November 21 of 2004. “Why does water expire?” I thought. I squinted at the bottle, mentally drowned out the sound of his voice, and tried to think of a conceivable reason that water would deteriorate to the point it would be considered dangerous to drink. The best I could come up with was that corporate suites in mirror-windowed offices hoped to market bottled water in wholesale clubs to housewives who would save it in case of a bad storm or the apocalypse and forget about it until November 21 of 2004 when they would race out to buy a mini-van’s worth, none of them realizing that the expiration date was merely a ploy. Pure water. Isn’t that redundant? Whose grand idea was it to bottle it up, ship it out, and market water based on purity, anyway? I imagined a board meeting where the idea-man pitched his advertising tactics: “Although easily accessible in your very own kitchen, you can now purchase water at your local grocery store! That’s right—for a dollar twenty-five of sheer inconvenience more than you’re already paying, you can get a whole 24 ounces of pure water that will eventually expire, despite its innate lack of rotting ingredients!”
“You know what I mean?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.” I remembered I was on the phone and slowly drifted back to the ongoing conversation.
“I just love her so much.” I sighed. This was not the way to win me over. He knew I didn’t like her. She treated him like dirt, making him question his every move so as not to upset her. He couldn’t go to the mall with his friends for fear of making her jealous and starting a fight. And it didn’t help that she was stealing him away from me. He called less now, confided in her more. I had always been a jealous person, but he wasn’t someone I ever worried about. He had always simply been there.
“If you love her so much, why is she hurting you? How can you love someone who treats you like that?” I knew this was dangerous road to travel.
“You always do that!” he yelled. “You tell me what to do! What makes you so smart?”
“My years of experience?” I joked.
He wasn’t amused. “You never listen to me!”
“Well, I kinda do,” I think. It was getting harder to want to follow his whiney rant about problems he creates for himself and never resolved. Besides, I was listening to him. Just not closely. Moreover, it’s not like I was contemplating the root of the word “water” as he spoke. It is, however, an interesting word. “Wat” at the beginning, concise, yet unfinished, reminding me of my elderly neighbor who had a stroke and pronounced “what” as though she had started to ask for water and forgot mid-word what her thought was, as though her thought had expired. She used to baby-sit us until she had her stroke; then she became a cruel joke of childhood, misunderstanding simple phrases, mispronouncing words, the left side of her face slightly warped, but not paralyzed. She became the evil witch in our stories, the monster to run from on Halloween. I sighed guiltily at the memory.
“Hey, remember
“Um, yeah. Why?”
“Dunno…just thought of her.”
“Are you listening to me?” I could hear he was annoyed.
“Yes. God. Why do you always ask me a million times?”
“Because you never sound like you are. Anyway, it’s not that I can’t live without her, I just don’t want to…” I let my mind drift back to water. “Wat” at the beginning, “er” at the end, suggesting more than just “wat.” More wat. More wat than what? Realizing this line of logic had no logic at all, I returned to my original thought: why does water expire? They don’t put expiration dates on lakes and rivers. Well, at least not before we dump toxic stuff in it. Toxic waste from companies manufacturing clear plastic sport top bottles that will eventually contain pure, fresh clear water. I smiled to myself at the irony of the situation. Had I been an activist of some kind, or any kind for that matter, I’m sure there was a protest to organize somewhere in that statement. Lucky for the toxic bottle makers, I was far too lazy to pull myself away from the phone conversation to organize a protest about water. Besides, I didn’t have the paint for signs like that. And I like the safety of the sports bottle cap with its ability to both trap the water in the toxic bottle as well as squirt friends up to seven feet away. “That’s what they should use for advertisements,” I thought. I envisioned a television ad that showed a number of teenagers running around with squirt guns, all falling victim to the one boy who dared to bring a Poland Spring Sports Cap Bottle. “Forget pure water,” the narrator would say, “ours expires! But that makes it a whole lot more fun to start water fights with your friends! Just wait until November 21 of 2004 and burn their clothes off their backs with out water acid—the weapon you can drink!”
Suddenly, this expiring water became all the more intriguing. If I was to break into the Poland Spring factory, change the expiration date to November 21 of 2005, millions of innocent pure water drinkers would taste toxic bottle taste instead of pure spring water. Not that I would, but it was a possibility.
“Anyway,” his voice called out to me, “thanks for listening. I guess that’s all I needed.” He sounded calm in comparison to the screaming fit he was at the beginning of the call.
“Anytime,” I say, feeling a bit guilty about having zoned out. “You know I love you.”
“Yeah, but you have to.”
“Oh? I was unaware that I was forced to love anyone.”
“Mom and Dad would kill you if you didn’t.”
“True. Hey, before you go, why do you think water expires?”
“I dunno…I guess if it doesn’t flow in the open air, in nature or something, it’s like being trapped in a cubical. It just has to get out. It has to breathe.”
“Yeah.” I ponder his statement for a moment before responding. “She’s not worth it, you know.”
“I never said she was. But I don’t know if she isn’t. And it’s something I just have to figure out.”
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