Memories, Dreams and Nightmares

I continued making the 6 day trips home to Houston, once a month. I think we made another weekend trip to San Antonio. We spent Christmas at my parents once again. Then in early 2009, the project in Oklahoma was finally winding down. Our manager had put together a plan to send us to work for the German division of the company for the rest of the year. My closest coworker refused and was fired on the spot. There’d be no flying home monthly from Germany but I was to get a 9 day off period in the spring. I started making plans for a vacation to Italy just for Tess and me. We would see Rome, Florence, Montepulciano, Naples and Pompeii. I worked really hard planning a perfect vacation, the best hotels that regular tourists would never find, the finest restaurants for dinner every night and every Renaissance, Medieval and Roman historical site and every amazing museum. And everywhere we’d go, on the luxury high speed rail Alta Velocita. The timing was perfect, the most beautiful weather of spring and before the tourist season so nothing would be crowded. The flight to Germany seemed longer than the flight to China, even though it was actually shorter. Considering that everyone looked like me and they all assumed I was a native born German when they looked at me, it was quite a culture shock. So many things were different but some things were the same in peculiar ways. I really started to like German beer and food and I started gaining weight. I learned to drive with a manual transmission since automatics are rare there. The whole time I was looking forward to my Italy trip with Tess. The closer it got, the more I looked forward to it. A month before the trip, Tess’ company imploded in on itself from mismanagement and she was left jobless. I had to start paying for our apartment in Houston by myself but luckily I didn’t have any other major expenses. The day Tess was scheduled to fly to Italy, she drove herself to the airport, she patiently waited for boarding to begin but then when boarding began she called me. She was crying and frozen in fear, she couldn’t bring herself to get on the plane. She was too scared to fly by herself. I tried my best to calm her down and get her to board but she ended up missing her flight. After that, she flat out refused to try and get on another flight. We fought pretty bitterly about it. I accused her of purposely trying to ruin our romantic vacation. She was jobless so she didn’t even have to take time off work and I was paying for the entire apartment, her gas & food money. Everything on the vacation was already booked and paid for in advance, so I ended up going by myself; my perfectly planned romantic vacation, alone. I tried to make the best of it. I bought a lot souvenirs and fine wine. I even bought Tess a handmade Florentine jewelry box, identical to the one the city of Florence gave to their princess when she became Queen of France. I spent almost the rest of the year in Germany. Tess was under a lot of stress, trying to find another job and I don’t think I helped being so mad at her for missing our trip. Eventually, she did find a new job with another startup, a Chinese company that contracted out Chinese petro-chemical engineers to analyze data. She was in charge of sales for Houston, trying to get Houston’s big oil companies to hire their contractors. We found ourselves both making six figures, her with all her sales commission and me with all my excessive overtime. Towards the end of the year, I finally got to fly home to Houston. Tess picked me up from the airport and immediately buried her head in my chest and started sobbing about how much she had missed me. We spent Christmas that year at our own apartment. We bought a fake tree at Target and way too many decorations at Ross and Marshall’s. She loved decorating our apartment for Christmas; it was plainly evident on her face. I went overboard for Christmas, bought her a lot of clothes from Neiman Marcus. How many men can successfully buy the correct size and style of designer clothes without their girlfriend being there? I don’t remember any of what I got that year but I still remember a couple of the dresses, the shoes and the jacket I picked out for her. As soon as Christmas was over, it was back to business as usual. I would fly to a project sometimes for a few days, a week or a month. Sometimes I would get to fly home to Houston but sometimes I would fly straight to the next project. We moved from our first Houston apartment to a new, fancier one near the Galleria. We sold the old furniture on Craig’s list and bought really nice new ones from Star Furniture. On one of my trips back, we decided to get rid of her old college car, a Suzuki that I hated, and we bought her a brand new, red Cadillac SRX. She was so excited to get such a fancy car. We drove it to the top of the parking garage at City Center to get some really good photos of her with it. We started talking seriously about getting married, buying a house, having kids. She wanted to have kids very badly. She wanted to have a daughter. And she wanted a great big, fancy house with a winding staircase so she could feel like a princess. I picked out a ring at Tiffany’s but I was always just so busy with work and I wanted to make the proposal something extra special. In the fall, she started putting pressure on me to find a job that kept me in Houston. I looked but only half heartedly; I really enjoyed the work I did even though it kept me away too much. In the fall, we talked about how I would need an adequate family car too. We decided on a BMW 5 series. I went to the dealership, I looked at several of their BMW 535i’s but they had this beautiful dark silver Porsche Cayman S. I never had thought I’d be able to afford a car as nice as a Porsche but I could afford this one. I just couldn’t stop looking at it and then I bought it. Tess was so angry with me, she had never held onto something like this before. I was supposed to get a family sedan because we were going to start a family. I was not supposed to get a 2 seat sports car. We fought over a month about it but I would just not give in. I really liked that car.
We spent Christmas 2010 together in our new apartment. We decorated together again. All the traveling was really starting to wear on me. I applied for several transfers to non-travel jobs in Houston. Tess’ insistence that I stop traveling was getting stronger. Towards the beginning of 2011 she was fired from her job. Apparently, she had modified an engineer’s resume to hide a 5-year employment gap because she couldn’t get anyone to contract him. The company found out and fired her on the spot and even threatened to sue her for damaging their reputation. There were more than a few big fights after that. Our fancy new apartment by the Galleria was over two grand a month and we had two car payments, I would have to work extra overtime to be able to cover all of our expenses. I started flying back to Houston a lot less often. Just mindlessly working and flying across the country from project to project. Towards the end of summer, I was stuck in the middle of nowhere in the mountainous part of Pennsylvania working on a 3 month project. I asked her to fly to Pennsylvania so we could have some serious time together, and despite yet again being jobless she refused because of her fear of flying by herself. I threatened to end our relationship. She begged and pleaded for me not to, she said she would do anything, anything, except fly by herself. Towards the end of the project in Pennsylvania, she found a new job with Halliburton. Despite the relief on our financial troubles, the fights had taken their toll and I was noticeably colder towards her. I stopped sounding as optimistic about getting married and starting a family. Christmas 2011, we flew together to Spain. We spent a few days in Barcelona, took a train to Madrid for 3 days and then back to Barcelona for a few more days. She seemed visibly relieved to have me for a whole week. She never wanted to be further than a couple inches from me. That whole year I had only averaged 1 weekend a month with her. I tried my best to have the vacation planned out and romantic like I had with the Italian one but I couldn’t do as good of a job since I knew almost nothing about Spain. Still, we had several romantic dinners including an amazing seafood restaurant in Barcelona and a Michelin starred restaurant a short train ride away in a small village. Unfortunately, by the time we left the restaurant, train services had stopped so we ended up having to take a very expensive taxi ride back to Barcelona. The trip did end up being romantic and I felt like it rekindled our romance somewhat. I ended up taking another million pictures of her all over Spain. It did keep bothering me though, that even though we were on vacation in Spain and even though it was Christmas she was constantly answering her phone for business calls from her new job. I even took pictures of her looking annoyed when she was on the calls. After Spain, it was back to work again.

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