kryptonite

There's this picture on Facebook. He's standing in profile, wearing khakis and a tie.  His hands are in his pockets, the hem of his blazer casually rumpled, one of those boy-details that has always undone me. And he's craning his neck, looking upwards at the shelves that fill the room. The caption — written by his sister, who’s studying divinity at Yale — tells me he’s looking at rare books in the Yale Club library.

I spent my first two years of college convinced, utterly convinced that this was the boy I was destined to marry. This picture, could I have seen it back then, would have done nothing to soften that conviction.

Morgan, as usual, sums it up best: “I can actually hear the sound of your 18-year-old underpants exploding from across the space-time continuum.”

tabula rasa

Looking back through my (admittedly slender) archives, I find I'm pleased about something.

I haven't actively curated the contents of this blog. Since February, I've written what's been on my mind. The stories are from last decade, last month, and last night; they're here because they don't tug at my mental corners quite as much once I've written them down. But when I review all of my entries -- both the published ones, and the dozens of drafts -- I notice a glaring and gratifying hole.

He's not here.

I'm cautious about how I explain this. I don't want to afford him too much weight -- and any weight seems like too much. But (don't all good stories start this way?) there was this one guy. A real piece of work. Of course, before I figured that out, I fell madly in love with him; became blind to all his flaws; and dated him for the better part of three years with what became self-flagellating vim. The final detonation involved STDs, the Craigslist casual encounters section, and a girlfriend in another state he'd somehow neglected to mention.

Morgan later described it as a "we-burned-this-shit-to-the-ground breakup." Accurate, but requires a stage note: I was using napalm.

So you can see how, if I'd started this blog a few years ago, it pretty much would have been a monograph on this cretin. You all would be as tired of listening to me as my friends were back then. But here we are in 2011, and my archives tell me he's been mentioned only once, in passing. He was just background in a story about someone else.

I expect I will write about him at some point. That's okay. I did a lot of dating and drinking with him, and those tales are part of how I got here.

But meanwhile, my own journal betrays the fact that he's vanished from my mental radar more completely than I once could have imagined. And that, ladies and gentlemen, seems like something worth celebrating.

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.

you're so normal

I was 23 at the time. Fresh off my first real heartbreak, my biggest and baddest breakup so far. In retrospect, it shocks me how quickly I got back in the saddle: I was on a date with this new boy three weeks later.

He was a little older. 26, maybe. Nice and tall, blond hair, very all-American. Played tennis.

There was one night, a couple months into things, when he looked at me admiringly and said, "You're just so normal."

At the time, I wasn't particularly flattered. I thought, okay buddy, if the nicest thing you can find to say about me is that I'm normal, I have a feeling this isn't going to be the love affair of the century.

Three years later, I have done more dating than my 23-year-old self would ever have considered possible. I'm better at it than I used to be, I think, but who can say?

And now, I find, normal sums up everything I'm looking for. It's the word I use when agreeing to go out with someone ("Sure, you seem normal.") or when justifying why I'm still going out with someone ("...but he's so nice and normal."). When my roommate proclaimed Vikram -- who I'll tell you about later -- to be normal, I think that was the moment I was determined to date him.

At 23, I didn't realize how rare it is to find normalcy without dullness. It's easy to meet men who are odd, interesting, and therefore attractive. But invariably they are also a little awkward, a little abrasive, a little inappropriate, a little...something. Just abnormal enough, one way or another, that introducing them to my family and friends is going to be an exercise in advocacy. 

My professional life consists of nothing but advocacy. I don't want to have to do it in my dating life, too. I want to be with someone who doesn't require any preamble.

That all-American boy -- I think he knew something I didn't.