way to my heart

Him, 2:21 pm:  Just leaving a lunch at the presidents' home.  I'm 
               important.

Him, 2:23 pm:  But not good at grammar.

Forget sexting.  This is the type of text that totally undoes me.

what lies ahead

I'm just inside Target, hunting for a red plastic basket that doesn't have gum stuck to the bottom, when my phone buzzes. It buzzes a lot these days.

"Want to know why alcohol is ridiculous?" He's at happy hour somewhere, a few beers deep.

Yes, I answer.

"It made me just now -- after all our conversations -- come to face the fact that I'm losing you."

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Remember that guy who asked me out the right way and had opinions on John Irving? He is, in fact, the only guy I've been seeing since September. And he is, in fact, my boyfriend. That's strange to type. But here we are.

There's just one little catch. The other thing I haven't told you is that I've been applying to graduate schools. Most of them are far away. And he's been applying to jobs. Working in athletics, as he does, he could end up nearly anywhere in the country. But there's not a lot of overlap between our likely destinations, and chances that we'll be in the same city four months from today are slim to none.

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"Noooooo, no, no," I text back immediately. "This isn't the week for that problem. You focus on getting the job. Then we'll deal with you and me."

I mean it. He knows I'm a) sincere and b) right. But oh, man.

Heartbreak is crouching right around that corner. And standing there by the Dollar Wall, with only my chintzy little basket for a shield, I can already feel how bad this is going to be.

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.”

third wheel

“I'm a waiter, and an uninvited participant in just about every date you've ever been on.”

Includes such gems as:  "When I return to drop their check, they're making out shamelessly, in the weird but common belief that because they are sitting and I am standing, I cannot see them."

I don’t even want to think about what waiters all over Los Angeles must think of me.

judge and jury

He says something, contradicts himself, anticipates my reaction, contradicts himself again.  Across the table, he's suddenly a one-man show, my own personal vaudeville act.

Laughing, I say, “I think I’ve just become totally irrelevant to this conversation.”

“No no, that was all for you,” he answers, returning to his ceviche.

“Correction:  I’ve become the audience to this conversation.”

“And the adjudicator.”

Well, yes.  “Well put,” I tell him.

He shrugs.  “The advantage of being a single girl.  Surely you know that?”

“Usually I try to pretend like I don’t.  It seems nicer that way.”

the awkward fairy

An email I sent to Marian, my best friend, one fine midsummer Tuesday afternoon:

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On the Fourth of July, I:

- Almost lit the house on fire.  Note to self:  Do not believe the guys at the fireworks stand who tell you that "nothing we sell will explode any higher than waist-height," since clearly they are talking about waist-height for Sasquatch.

Yesterday, I:

- Threw Adam out of my apartment at 10 a.m. so he would not be there when Nolan came to pick me up at 10:30 a.m.  I think I am a bad person.

- Went on an 11-hour maybe-date with Nolan, which was dive-bombed somewhere around hour 10 by a visit from the Awkward Fairy, in the guise of a Channel 9 newswoman.  I'm heading into a meeting right now, but do I have a story for you later.

-----------------------------------------------

I'll tell you the rest next week, yes?

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.