niche

We're getting ready for bed, and I have my back to the room, pulling the curtains closed.

From behind me, a voice: "Your butt in pajamas might be my favorite thing ever."

I snerk, turning around. From the waist down, I am built along Kardashian lines, in that inescapable genetic way that no diet or exercise will ever change. "I'm glad you think so," I tell him, "because my butt caters to a niche market."

He throws up his hands and announces happily, "I am your niche!"
    

Sometimes it's just that simple, you know?

like the movies

Summer of 1999. First day of high school orientation. I was, what, 14? "Painfully self-conscious" doesn't even begin to describe it. He was the leader of my orientation group, beautiful in the way that only unattainable senior boys can be -- olive-skinned, dark-haired, self-assured. I wasn't the only one who thought so; the whole female freshman population was in love with him by October. Because real life isn't like the movies, he did not ask me to prom.

Summer of 2007. I'd just graduated from college. One of my best friends was turning 21, and there was drinking to be done, so we were getting the party started on the steps of the birthday boy's apartment. And suddenly, over the salted rim of my margarita, there was Tony Caruso -- the senior god himself. He looked exactly the same. Maybe it was the tequila, but I found to my own surprise that I was now able to speak, walk, and breathe normally in his presence.

It wasn't until halfway through the evening, when someone in the group referenced our high school, that he turned to me specifically. "Wait. Did you go to [our high school] too?" he asked.

I couldn't suppress a grin. "You wouldn't remember it," I told him, "but you were actually my orientation leader. I'm Clare Alexandra."

"Clare?" You could see him trying to compare current-me with his faded library of mental snapshots from 1999. "Really?  But I think I would have noticed you..." He was actually flustered. He squinted at me a little more, and then finished with, "You...um. Wow. You grew up really nice."

I had a little moment, right there on Sherman Way in the warm summer air.  Tony Caruso had just looked at me with admiration, and had told me (in the most inarticulate way possible) that he thought I was pretty.  Sometimes real life is like the movies, after all.

Summer of 2011. I'd forgotten all about Tony in the intervening four years, but last week I stumbled across his Facebook profile. He's married now. (To a girl who looks a lot like me, if we're being strictly honest here.) And this story doesn't really have a point, except to say that I had another little moment, looking at his picture and remembering the cinematic summer night when he thought I grew up really nice.  If I was a motivational speaker, I'd tell all the high school girls that story.

talisman

It must have been sometime in July. Maybe that night when he turned up at the dive bar down on the corner where we were, as usual, nursing beers and playing Photo Hunt. We'd been there all night, but he was a little drunker than the rest of us. Embarrassingly, he kept trying to kiss my neck, in a very non-PG manner. I was hoping my roommates would be too fixated on the screen to notice. Of course they weren't.

But later that night, we were lying in my bed, sober again. The walls in that apartment were paper-thin and everyone else was asleep. So he was talking right into my ear, low and soft.

"Don't answer. Just let me say this," he told me.

"You need to know that you're amazing. You are sexy" -- he ran a hand down the flat of my stomach -- "and funny, and so smart. And you have a good heart. I can tell." He was a deliberate person, but that night he spoke more deliberately, more earnestly than usual. "I hope you know that you deserve someone just as amazing. And...and even if that person isn't me, I hope you never settle. You deserve someone who appreciates what you are."

I was quiet for a minute. My instinct was to say something self-deprecating, deflect all the compliments. But he'd already told me not to answer. So eventually I just whispered, "Thank you," and pulled him closer to me.

That was Adam. There were any number of reasons why Adam was not the one for me, and vice versa. But eight months later, I realize how grateful I am for that little speech, even if I still don't know why he felt compelled to make it. Truth be told -- and what is this blog for, if not the truth? -- there have been one or two nights since then when that memory has been my talisman.

Sometimes I'm almost positive that the universe is making sure I have everything I need.