As we made our way to the car, she started apologizing between my intermittent sighs of, “It’s fine. It’s okay, Karin. Let’s just go home.” This routine replayed the relationship from the start at the martial arts school, where we joked and play-sparred after her first class. She seemed articulate, professional, and maintained an active lifestyle extending from martial arts to weightlifting at the gym, which provided a shapely body guided by an attractive determination. The façade revealed after months of dating when she stopped going to the gym and martial arts, choosing to spend her nights and weekends watching television.
Long before she unveiled laziness, I chose to ignore crucial warnings beginning on the third date when she spent the night at my apartment and told me she was a Christian after fucking me. Her declaration should have been a warning siren for needing announcement after premarital sex and not left to assumption like most supposed Christians. No, Karin wanted me to know she was no Christian part-timer, and as the evening stretched into night, she made subtle Jesus references but watching the History Channel’s dinosaur show exposed completely her danger I foolishly ignored. Showing too much curiosity in the extinct beasts running about the screen drew Karin’s inquiry, “You don’t believe in that, do you?”
“In what? Dinosaurs?”
“Yes.”
I frowned. “I didn’t know their existence was debatable.”
She scowled and grabbed the remote. “They’re not real.”
I laughed, “How can you say that? I’ve seen them in the Smithsonian. They're huge.”
Disturbed, she pulled a blanket tighter around her, took aim at the TV, and pressed the remote. “Well, maybe they were a mistake. Maybe that’s why God flooded the earth to get rid of them.”
“Right.”
Realizing her seriousness, I turned to the TV now playing the Lifetime channel, which dictated a polite evening ended with a promise to call followed by excuses to never see her and ignoring calls and text messages if necessary. Abandoning that wisdom now pained me with the last three years of jealousy, Lifetime, constant berating to go to church, and mediocre sex: the price for not scrounging women from bar’s singles scenes.
