The cousin

Originally this was a second part to another story that I ultimately decided not to share. It was a story about my attempt to make moves on a young woman I had met at school – whom we shall call Nicole. My attempts with her was simply a train-wreck and didn’t end well. In fact, someone I didn’t know had to tell me to back off of her and I did disappointed though not that surprised considering how my attempt was going.

This story was dealing with the aftermath of some of the bad moves I made back then. One of which was talking to family and you never know who’ll get the news and who might decide they’ll try to see what’s what. It happened and the person in question was a cousin – we’ll call her Natalie – with whom I’ve rarely had contact with or better yet we seem to have random run-ins.

Now just so that this won’t be a post where I’ll just discuss the negative about her, she’s generally gregarious and the family basically cares for her greatly. Also she generally had a rough childhood however she’s developed quite nicely. My cousin is a wife and mother and her occupation is in health care. She definitely has her positives but we’ve never really had a positive relationship.

Better yet, because we seem to have these odd infrequent run-ins I generally won’t allow it and at times she may show how she just doesn’t understand. There are more outspoken family members, her way is just with the look on her face showing her disapproval and generally says very little until an more outspoken relative decides to point it out. I’ve started to realize this was quite unfair because I’m not sure what just happened, but whatever.

A few months after my failed attempt with Nicole, my cousin visited my mother at home. This was exactly the weekend I returned to Chicago from school. My cousin had been in town visiting her relatives and her in-laws. When she came over she brought her young son along.

My mother used to complain about the fact that I don’t enjoy speaking to people and on this day had the need to rip me away from what I had been doing in the other part of the house to speak to Natalie. Her excuse was to show footage I had videotaped from the previous year’s family reunion and she told me to bring laptop with me when she came to me she complained again that I need to come up and speak.

So I went to the living room with laptop, and Natalie immediately got very excited to see me – that’s how she often seems to be. Basically just before I set up the laptop she basically starts a rapid fire series of questions such as “how’s school?”, “how are the grades?”, “how are you?” sort of questions which for the most part I only answer OK. Trying not to really have a full on convo, but surely the message here was not in the mood stop!

She finally asked me something different and it wasn’t one I could only answer either yes or no or OK to, “what’s your major?”. I tell her my major but she didn’t follow that line of questioning and decided to make this statement, “i heard you got a little girlfriend!” At that point I was like no, NOT you, NO!!!!!

To be sure there was some form of drama there, but it wasn’t something I really intended to share with anyone. Other than I suppose some of the friends at school, but she decided to go there and had no problem with it. Needless to say when she made her statement there was dead silence in the living room.

Nat: You didn’t know about that?

Me: No!

Nat: *forces herself to laugh* I’m serious! What’s her name?

Me: *continues to focus on laptop in dead silence*

Nat: So you’re not going to tell me?

Me: There isn’t one…

Nat: There isn’t one? *sits back on the couch ending convo*

At that point I hurry up and leave the living room. My mother was sitting there in dead silence herself and seemingly uncomfortable. I estimate that whole attempt of a convo was roughly 30-45 seconds. She got excited, got started, and likely got let down quick.

My mother hadn’t forgotten and just told me off about it later. She claimed to have never seen anything like what she saw on that afternoon. In her opinion I was just ruthlessly cold to her, later my explanation for most of that performance was that she walked into a forbidden subject for which I was not going there with her. In some cases my mother just simply said I could’ve just made up something.

Later on Natalie’s son runs through the house and I look out of my room seeing what was going on. She came and grabbed him hitting me with that same disapproving look she tends to give. It could be attributed to my cold answers to her a few minutes earlier. Or perhaps there was an uncut version of the reunion video that she saw and was never intended to be seen.

Who knows, but at this point she wasn’t too thrilled with me and it was a double whammy in this case. As for the future, Natalie is not exactly the type that would continue to hold a grudge. I might make her angry today, but tomorrow she’ll probably try again and be as friendly as she attempted to be on this day.