Going home

This week, I dithered about how I was going to get home for a vacation next week. I tried renting a car, I tried finding adequate plane tickets, I tried buses, but ultimately, I was led to the train. I will be spending ten hours in a train next week, going home to spend five days sleeping in my parents' basement and going to eat at Perkins with them. Oh, dear God.

Every time I go home, it's the same...We walk into Perkins (my mother stopped cooking when I was ten) and mom obviously points to the night manager on duty, saying "Amy, doesn't he look like Freddie Prinze, Jr.?"
"No, Mom, he doesn't. Not even if I squint."
"Well, he's always real, real nice to us."
"I'm not marrying him, Mom."
"I didn't say you had to. I just said he was handsome. And maybe that he looked like someone you'd think was 'hunky.' "
"Mom, I babysat kids older than him. And when have I EVER used the word 'hunky'?"
"Oh, oof, just sit down and stop sassing me. Say, there's that nice man who sold us a footstool at Hennen's. I hear he's divorced. He kinda looks like Harrison Ford, doesn't he?"
"STOP IT!"

If it's not the furniture store guy or the Perkins night manager, it's the kid whose parents live down the road from my mom and dad who now lives in Nashville and produces Contemporary Christian Music and is still nursing his high school crush on my school's only documented lesbian. He's a really great guy, but I can't get over the fact that I once saw him weeping copiously in school when his parakeet had escaped and flown off into the wild. There he was, in the back of Mrs. Erickson's sixth grade class, silently sobbing and drawing a picture of his budgie on his book cover. That's not a mental image one is likely to forget when choosing a mate. Plus, if he's still pining for the lesbian, it's doubtful if he'd even be interested in me.

So, I'm taking the train home largely so that my mother can exercise her atrophied matchmaking muscles. She's unaware of how bad she is at it, and how obvious her machinations are, but it's very sweet. She means well, but truthfully, if there had been anyone datable in my home town (pop. 1066), I would have dated them in high school. Actually, in high school, it was ME that everyone thought was the lesbian. The actual lesbian wore sweater sets and curled her hair. Guess we both had everyone fooled!

The last time I took the train home, I wound up running in to the first boy I ever dated after not seeing him in three and a half years. We met when we were 12. At asthma camp. I was waiting in Union Station in Chicago, during a three hour layover when he walked by me. I called his name, he turned abruptly, and it took him what seemed like minutes to recognize me. It broke over him like a slow wave and he rushed over to give me a hug. We sat and talked before boarding the same train, and during our conversation, the frames of his glasses snapped in two. "You know," he said, "I've had these glasses since just before the last time I saw you." Hm. We sat next to each other for our ten hour ride through the snowy landscape to St. Paul, watching the Christmas lights of Wisconsin flash by the windows. We talked. We talked. We talked. He was a man in love with words, so we talked even more. At some point, I showed him my very new engagement ring. He said that he had always regretted the fact that we had never really and truly dated. I almost hit him for saying that.

When you're 12, you're not dating for real. It's just play. It's just something to do between arts and crafts and dinner time at asthma camp. But I was always very attatched to him. I always hoped in my heart that we would both find ourselves in the same fabulous city, fabulously successful, and our paths would cross and we'd fall in love and have a Hepburn-Tracy repartee-filled romance. So there we were, in a fabulously implausible scenario (what's more Hepburn-Tracy-like than a chance meeting at a train station?), in a fabulous city and we didn't really do anything about it. I was engaged. He was dating someone. We lost touch. So. So, another impossibly gorgeous scenario just winds up being a funny story to tell people when the subject of trains come up in conversation. Last year, I was living in New York when I happened to open up the New York Post to the business section and saw his name in the byline of one of the articles. I smiled and threw the paper away, not bothering to see if there was an email address below the article. I figured that, if we were supposed to meet again, we would.

I told that story to my friend who took me to the Cubs game on Monday. This is the same friend who took me to the other Cubs game back in June. He said that I'm like Brenda Starr, with weird coincidences happening to me all the time. That somehow, my life is made up completely of synchronicitous events, devoid of all design and plan. Maybe THAT'S why I can't resign myself to dating the pre-pubescent night manager of Perkins. How could he possibly compete with Amtrak?

Celebrate, redux

Today is the eighth anniversary of the day I married my ex husband. The eighth anniversary is the bronze anniversary. Bronze like third place. Bronze like missing that step in the triple jump and landing a couple of inches shy of first place, but those couple of inches gnaw at you and grate like the sand that worked its way into your singlet when you landed and this was your last shot at the Olympics because you're "over the hill" in the world of athletics when in the real world you're not even old enough yet to be elected senator, and your left knee is practically shot anyway from years and years of beating your body up just to fly farther, to do better (did I just tear my meniscus?), but you missed that chance, that FINAL chance and all you can taste is your own sweat and the steely tang of failure in your mouth as you stand on top of the shortest step at the medal ceremony and watch that stuck up Bulgarian bitch get the gold you've given up your LIFE for as you look out over the faces of the rest of the athletes who didn't even place, but you hate them, hate them one and all because they didn't lose...they've got next time...you don't...all you have is a bronze fucking medal because...you...failed.

Yesterday was the third anniversary of my divorce being final. The third anniversary is leather. Leather like hot, wet, dangerous and fast things. Leather is so much better than bronze, isn't it?

The end of Lonely St.

I have noticed a startling thing about the building in which my (terribly cute!) apartment is located. After perusing my management company's list of available apartments, it seems to me that my entire building is made up of studios and one bedrooms. Okay. Interesting. Even in a building thusly arranged, one would assume there would be a couple cohabitating, right? After careful observation, I have yet to locate even one couple. The names on the buzzers are all singular. People entering and exiting my building do it solo. I have only ONCE heard someone in my building having sex and that was at about 4 in the morning, which is traditionally a time that single people bring their hookups home. After all, that's when the bars close here. Name me ONE couple that lives together that has sex at 4 in the morning. Seriously, you don't know of any, right?

I live in a building devoted to Lonelyhearts. I'd like to think that my building was for the rugged individualist, the independent and emancipated, but after seeing the people in my building come and go for the last few months, there seems to be an air of mournful acquiescence to singlehood about them. The lady who talks to her shi-tzu like it's a baby... The old man who comes home from the grocery store with one small bag of groceries and sighs as he opens the front door... The young woman who always seems to be having an argument on her cell phone with someone who doesn't show her respect... My neighbor who trudges up the stairs with resigned sadness on weekend nights, dressed in slightly rumpled going out clothes... When I signed my lease, I was happy to have my own oasis of home in this brand new to me city. It was only later that I realized I had put my name on a piece of paper that effectively guaranteed the fact that I wouldn't be in a serious relationship for a year. Aiee. Elenor Rigby, party of one?

None of this mattered to me until Saturday. I was fine casually dating and pretty OK with the fact that I may, in fact, never find a lasting relationship. My motto was "Better to be alone than in asshole company." In fact, I had just kissed SB Thursday goodnight and sent him on his way when it happened. My stupid heart -- which has been the bane of my existence but heretofore in strictly an emotional, not physical, way -- started to flutter and beat in a way that suggested jazz syncopation gone awry. I tried to sleep, but then my inner herald of doom said "Go ahead, but you might not wake up." Wide awake, then, I called the only person I knew who might be up at that hour, my Ex Who Says He Will Never Love Again. He wasn't answering the phone, so I had to piece together an alternative plan. That plan consisted of opening the yellow pages to the section marked "Hospitals" and then lying on the floor, squeezing a baseball. For some reason, if I was going to die, I wanted to do it on my kitchen floor, not in bed. But that's where it hit me...no matter how free being single makes me, no matter how accepting and happy I am about BEING single, I could still die alone. And that, in the words of several sages throughout time, sucks donkey dick.

Maybe I should buy a shi-tzu.

It came from the Past...

Yesterday, I had somewhat interesting conversations with three men from my past.

The Ex Who Says He Will Never Love Again called about an audition he went on. I was glad to hear from him and, as we talked, I started to forget why I broke up with him in the first place. Money management issues? Fiscal responsibility? Bah! He makes me laugh! Why did I shuffle him off like so much Buffalo? One of the other prime reasons for breaking it off was the fact that he was doing virtually nothing with his artistic life, which is the sole reason he was in New York in the first place. Now, he nailed the audition, got cast and is on his way to doing 4 shows a week. So, I spent much of my evening yesterday talking to him in tender tones, which is only confusing him AND me at this point. I do this. I recycle.

Also, I talked to Harold yesterday. That was the first time since the marathon "this isn't working" call and I was wary of talking to him. Frankly, I was afraid of not sounding cool. It's always permissable to weep and sputter and beg a kind word out of someone when you've ended things with THEM, but when it's the other way around, you have to sound like you're fucking Batman...supercool and a superhero. You gotta sound like you've got so many other better things to do than talk to them. And, when you get another call, you say "I gotta take this. Call you back later?" If your voice cracks, if you sound like you're pleading, if at any point you even ASK HOW THEY'RE DOING, you LOSE, Charlie. So I was cool. And then, I didn't need to force myself to be cool anymore. Harold is afraid. I don't want to spend my life with someone so limited by fear. So, it was cool. I was cool. I called him a pussy and we argued about the Olympics.

My last conversation with the past was a little one-sided. I had to stay home to wait for the gas man to fix something, and I wound up watching "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood." I was flipping through the channels and found myself mesmerized by the sight of an older man slowly, peacefully hanging up a suit coat. He turned and smiled, and I smiled back. He visited a ballet dancer before deconstructing the purposes of art on the bench in his Trolley nook. "Do you ever dance about your feelings?" Yes, Mr. Rogers. "Do you ever sing about your feelings?" Yes, Mr. Rogers. "Do you ever paint pictures about your feelings?" Yes, Mr. Rogers. I just don't honor, respect or verbalize them, which is why I date ridiculous men, read books rather than make friends and drink as much gin as I do. In the Land of Make Believe, King Friday ordered Corny to manufacture a machine that looks inside things. That was an unintentional bit of existentialism right there. Mr. Rogers' show made kids hope. I'm still trying to figure out if that was a blessing or if he did us all a disservice.

Terminal

Just now, I exited Osco Drug with a purchase typical of my juvenile mindset: Brachs Dessert Mints (the meltaway kind), Bazooka bubble gum and Diet Pepsi. As I exited the automatic door -- a door, might I add, that lets you get WAY too close to the actual door before opening so you're not sure if it actually WILL open or if you're going to smack your nose into it, causing you to do a weird stutter step that infuriates anyone behind you -- I swung to my right to head north back to the office and got phenomenally dizzy. Rather than sit down and wait it out, I did what thousands of other of my lineage, stubborn Germans all, have done throughout the years...I kept fucking walking.

When I was 18 and moving in to college, my newly diabetic father suffered some kind of attack. He was driving our car along the student-congested street that bordered the campus to the south when his body began to violently jerk. "DAD!" I said, "PULL THE FUCK OVER!" Dad, between jerks, looked back at me and said "I am FINE." I lept out of the still moving car and ran up to a very convenient fraternity guy who was passing out Kool-Aide to the new students. Too politely for the situation, I inquired as to the availability of said Kool-Aide and brought it back to the car, which had continued on more than half a block since my exit. I forced it upon Dad, a la "Steel Magnolias,": Drink the juice, Shelby! Dad wasn't happy with me then. Come to think of it, I believe he still brings it up on holidays; "You know, I really WAS fine, Amy."

That's how we are, my people, my family. We just keep soldiering on, come hell or high blood pressure. So, I staggered the next few blocks back to the office, weaving like a drunk after last call as my head swam and tinny rings sounded in my ears. "This is finally it," I thought. "I'm terminal." You see, my father's side of the family insists on insisting that everything is OK despite obvious clues to the contrary while my mother's family believes that they are, at any given time, about to die of an undiagnosed illness. So far, I have believed myself to be dying of leukemia, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, lymphoma, an aneurism, phlebitis, diabetes, cardio myopathy, and several insidious forms of brain tumor. Yet, I haven't been to a doctor in years. I embody the best of both sides: the outward insistance that I am fine, but an inner belief that I am doomed.

This makes me think, though. What if I WAS terminally ill? What would I do then? And, more importantly, who would I marry? There are those boys, past, present and perhaps future, whom I would consider spending the rest of my life with, if the rest of my life were somewhere in the realm of 6 months to a year. The best example is the Ex Who Swears He Will Never Love Again. I would love to be married to him if I was terminal. He was attentive and thoughtful and he made me laugh really hard. I wouldn't have to worry about his irresponsibility with money, because I wouldn't CARE if he blew $500 on video games. We wouldn't have to worry about putting money away for a house or our kids' education, so why the fuck not? Also, that trait would likely play out to mean that he'd be spending $500 on dessert mints and Bazooka for me, attentively thoughtful man that he is. Yeah, he'd probably get evicted for REAL that time, but he could just live in my hospital room, holding my hand and feeding me ice chips.

I feel much better now. Much less likely to marry, anyway.

A Clockwork Heart

"...he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy."

Last evening, I watched "A Clockwork Orange" for the first time. YPB brought it over to my house in response to my assertion that if a movie had been declared "important" or "a cult classic" or even "remotely interesting," I had very likely never seen it. He brought a selection, of which I had seen only "Snatch" and that only because of the best efforts of a hip friend. During the movie, I marvelled at the fact that I could understand Alex's point of view. He committed his acts of Ultra Violence the way I fall in and out of love...mechanically, as a matter of rote. It's simply what he was good at. Being that I have long thought of myself as a person with an attachment disorder when it comes to romantic relationships, I could understand and somewhat applaud the clockwork. Wind me up, point me at a guy and watch me go.

From Thursday to Sunday, I alternated boys...SB Thursday on Thursday, YPB on Friday (and truthfully, straight on through 'til Saturday morning), SB Thursday on Saturday (and truthfully, straight on through 'til Sunday morning) and YPB on Sunday. Saturday, at SB Thursday's party, I was uncharacteristically mellow, and wound up cornering my friend Tony for a game of Gin. Tony is really named Tony. He hasn't disappointed me, but I haven't ever made out with him, so he needs no pseudonym, no reductive nom de guerre. After Gin, I danced a little, but stopped when SB Thursday had separated me from the pack of other dancers and started looking at me like I was a wounded antelope. I wouldn't let myself get culled that night.

At around 3, I begged off, but was trailed out the door by SB Thursday who asked to join me for a grilled cheese and fries at the Diner of the Old Man Who Stops Me Every Day On My Way to Work ("Bob"). At the diner, I swiveled my stool towards SB Thursday and fit myself into the negative space created by the curve of his body. For a moment, I let him shelter me. And it was good. He drove me home and stayed with me, though I wanted nothing more from him than that small moment of closeness in the diner. I did kiss him. I did let him rest his arm on my hip as he slept. That's the least I could do.

YPB and I had a dissimilar evening together yesterday. We only swapped a couple of stories before we began seriously encroaching on each others' personal space. Every time we'd pull back from a kiss, I could see that both of us were thinking the same thing about each other, "Who ARE you?" I like the way his hands feel on my back. I like the expanse of skin between his shoulder and jaw. I like the supposition of physical contact that eases itself into the air between us. But do I like him? Moreover, do I like me when I'm with him?

One day, the springs and cogs that make up my heart will wind down completely, never to run aimlessly toward an unsuspecting man ever again. Or I will simply lose the wind up key and it will sit idle. I don't doubt my ability to love, so much. But I do doubt my ability to love well.

Raconteur squared

Last evening, Yahoo Personals Boy came to see me perform. It was a solid show, and I whisked him out of the theater so that I wouldn't have to invite SB Thursday along to the Lakeview with us. There was an awkward little two step that happened when SB Thursday stepped unknowingly between YPB and I, asking what I was up to. I politely said I had to hang out with a friend and that I'd see him the next evening, which is tonight, which is why I'm writing at all...I'm wasting time before I head over to his party so that it's not just he and I there, drinking beer and making awkward small talk.

YPB and I like to tell each other stories. One story will dovetail into another and another, without any time spent on reflection or questioning, just an endless stream of anecdote. As someone who routinely walks to work without moving her eyes up from the book she's reading, this is quite a workable communication style for me. I get the sense we're more comfortable talking about life than living it. It's the attractive relational hamster ball of the actor/writer/artist...we can observe the world, we can run around in it, but the emotional distance provided by a good story protects us a little from actually having to deal with the world.

So YPB and I sat at the Lakeview and began our story cycle. At some point, his hand bumped mine and our fingers wove together. Neither of us made any outward sign that we noticed this...the stories just kept going. Then, my forefinger trailed up and down his forearm as I told him about my semester in England. His arm slipped behind me and his hand curved around my waist as he talked about being in Hawaii in the Navy. As I began to regale him with an anecdote about my favorite 24 hour bakery in Boston, his head dropped low and he kissed my collarbone. At that moment, the thens and one times of our stories ceased to be of any relevance. We surfaced from the past for a while and felt what it was like to be in the world. So far, the world isn't too bad.

The #22 Bus

Last night, SB Thursday and I went to Carol's again, but I didn't leave at 9, like I promised. We left around 11, when the crowd got ugly. Almost all at once, some tragically upwardly mobile kids came in, causing the Korean vet with the potbelly and the unnaturally black haired woman with ill-fitting dentures to leave. I was sad about this because I had been having an almost interesting conversation with the black haired woman, despite being distracted by the fact that her dentures seemed to move in her mouth independently of the motion of her jaw. I began that conversation to avoid having to talk to a man in a fedora who was talking about how the Jews were ruining the world. I tuned him out sometime around when he said that the vast stores of "Jew diamonds" that were in the World Trade Center when it collapsed were never recovered. Somehow, this led him to the Irish Mafia, Vietnam and Pvt. Lynndie English pointing at an Iraqi man's genetalia. Poor SB Thursday had to listen, though as Fedora Nazi kept pointing directly at him. Eventually, after hugging the Korean vet and crying a little onto his sleeve, even Fedora Nazi slipped off his barstool and into the night. The kids displaced all of the interesting people simply due to the fact that they were so brand new to adulthood. They looked a little bit like bread dough rising in their suits and Banana Republic career separates. They're not bad people, but really, they're barely people yet.

All of us at the bar - me, SB Thursday, the anti-Semites, the career kids, the gypsies, tramps and thieves - had an undeniable air of expectancy. What are we all waiting for? The kids looked as if they were waiting for the time that they could finally say they had "made it." I know the look. I was married to the look for four years. The denture lady was maybe waiting for someone to need her. Someone to grab her hand and say "I've missed you." The Fedora Nazi was waiting for someone to agree with him, to talk him out of his despair and say "I know exactly what you mean." SB Thursday was waiting for me to make up my mind about him, but he didn't know I already had. I was waiting for what I always wait for...my heart to be smashed to bits by a love too big for it to hold. And SB Thursday doesn't inspire that kind of feeling in me. He is a good, kind man, but he is not MY good, kind man. So, we all get to keep waiting.

I thought about all of this as I waited for the bus this morning. Typically, the #22 will either come at a very inappropriate time or not come at all. This morning it was more along the lines of not at all. I waited, I read my book and tried to be calm, but I found myself walking out into the road and staring with shielded eyes up Clark St. After fifteen or so minutes, more people joined me and we became impatient en masse. I was about to give up and catch a cab when I saw the sun glinting off the top of the bus, some three blocks away. It always comes when you give up and curse it. It's always there when you've ceased believing in its existence at all. It comes and, when the door opens with its pneumatic "shush" sound, you feel a little foolish for doubting. It would be facile and slightly disgusting of me to say that life and love are like the #22 bus, but the greater truth is that statement would be a complete lie. What I've learned at the beginning of my tenure as a full-on adult is that sometimes the metaphorical bus just never comes. Nobody ever tells you that. Sometimes we die alone, sometimes we never find someone who shares our thoughts, sometimes we are not needed by anyone and sometimes, no matter how hard we work, we do not make it. The trick is how we get along when the bus doesn't come.

The Winter of My Discontent

The weather is unseasonably cold today. I am wearing a long sleeved shirt and a wool sweater, which should never, never happen in August. It is raining. It smells of fall. Just as a detail, the sweater was one I gave to the Ex Who Says He Will Never Love Again. It keeps me warm, even if he no longer does.

There's a general malaise settling in around me. This indescribably dense cloud of ennui that usually appears when things have been too still in my life for too long. "Too long" is usually a few days, which is an infinitessimal amount of time to normal, thoughtful people, but an eternity to me. I am a human blender. I am chaos theory. I am scattered, in every sense of the word.

The feeling builds, this discontented restlessness, until I do something rash and stupid. Last time, it was a tattoo of a dragon on my foot, which I had to cover with Band-Aids last weekend when my parents visited. The time before that, it was taking this job in Chicago. Or maybe I should count Harold as the last rash and stupid thing, shouldn't I? The point is, the rash things stir up my life so that I can predictably have something to do for a period ranging from a couple of days to a few years. And, because my life is in this constant upheaval, I can keep smoking. "I'll wait 'til things calm down to quit." You see, I've designed my life so that things are NEVER calm. Clever, clever little smoker!

I am wondering what this next rash thing will be. I am meeting SB Thursday for a beer and then I am forcing myself to go home at 9 pm on the dot. If, at any point during this evening, I feel like saying "Hey, let's go set fire to something!" or "You want to get married?", I will shut the Christing hell up.

Seeking...

I resorted to the Yahoo Personals lately, and have had a tremendous response from, you guessed it, older men. Frequently, these older men's living situations will be listed as "Living with parents." At what point will they realize that being 55 and still at Mom and Dad's house renders you undatable? Amongst the vast flood of the old and scary (like the Russian who refused to tell me where he was and used atrocious grammar..."He's in prison" my friend said, reading his emails.), there have been a few people who have sparked my interest. One of them is a bit of a stretch for me because his first contact with me was an email that said "Are you really as much of a wild child as your profile says?" Typically, that would be a red flag for me, but he's so...chiseled. His profile picture(s) show a darkly handsome man with a cleft in his chin that you could open a beer bottle with, so I will excuse the wretchedness of his introduction. And I will ignore the fact that his hobbies and interests are "sports, playing pool and hanging out with my buddies." Why will I ignore this? Because I'm the asshole who ignored someone's goddamn ARREST RECORD and ANGER ISSUES before. Let's not fool ourselves...I make poor decisions.

Last evening, I met up with another guy from the personals. We have been obsessively emailing each other because we have similarly sick senses of humor and I suspect we both like the idea of corresponding with someone whose views are so similar to our own. It's very masturbatory and who, besides the Catholic church, doesn't like masturbation? In person, he was fairly attractive, kind of tall, and had a disarming smile. The downside? He bore a slight resemblance, in accent and manner and smile, to an ex of mine. I spent the whole conversation trying to plow through the presumptions I'd made about him based on the random coincidences of genetics and geography and I still don't know if I was successful in separating the man that is from the man that was. We talked, we showed off our tattoos, we drank a couple of beers, and then it was time to go. Outside of the bar, we stood stiffly, waiting for the other to decide what the appropriate course of action for the next few moments would be. Finally, after much shifting of weight from one foot to the next, combined with utterances of "Well!" and "So!", he leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. It was very near my mouth, and expertly placed. Too far up on the actual cheek itself would have been too friendly, too benign. Too close to the mouth and it would have appeared that he had aimed for my mouth and missed. It was just right, and I said "Thank you!" out of genuine delight. Then, he thrust out his hand and shook my hand with a force likely brought about by the profound relief of navigating an awkward situation successfully. "See you again?" I said. "Yes. Definitely." he said.

Cat has left the building

My almost nightly calls to and from Harold always found me out on my back porch, as if the conversations were too big for my tiny (and terribly cute!) apartment. Truth be told, I liked to smoke when I talked to him as it made me feel like I was somehow multitasking. I am not required by my lease to smoke outside, but I am almost physically incapable of smoking inside. It's one of many little pet quirks of mine. While sitting outside, the Cat Who Lived Upstairs ("Cat," for short) would always come down to visit me.

Cat and I had an understanding. Cat could show as much affection to me as he wanted, with the knowledge that I could not pet him back. Cat seemed happy with the arrangement we had worked out whereby I would stroke his back with the toe of my shoe, keeping my hands and face as far away from him as possible. Being allergic, my associations with cats have all had to take place at a distance of at least five feet, but Cat was able to come a little bit closer. I would talk to Harold, and sometime during the conversation, as I sat on the stairs, I would feel a gentle bump on my back and know that Cat was head butting me in greeting. Soon thereafter, Cat would stand on his back feet to peer through my screen door, sometimes standing that way for up to fifteen minutes, the sight of my kitchen table apparently a source of great fascination. Cat would come and go in the hours that I spent talking with Harold, but it was usually me who walked away and left Cat on the landing when my phone call was done.

Cat had a particular fondness for following me to the laundry room. He would walk complacently by my side, in a spot on "heel" that my dog could never even hope to match as I lumbered around the corner to the laundry room under the inevitable ten tons of laundry. Upon reaching the door, Cat would step up onto the sill and press himself against the door as if to say "There's no hope of getting in without me. Might as well just resign yourself to my presence." Cat liked to jump up on the folding table and amuse himself with dryer lint while I loaded the machines. A surprised tennant came in once and saw us there, ragged Cat and rumpled Woman, and said "Is this your cat?" "Him?" I said, looking at Cat who looked back at me, "No. Why?"

In the mornings, as I went to work, Cat and I would cross paths occasionally. Most of the time, Cat was headed out, but sometimes, Cat was on his way back home. When he was leaving, I would open the chain link door for him so that he didn't have to flatten himself to the dirty asphalt to squeeze under it, and say "Have a good day at work, dear. Don't stay at the office too late." I swear Cat smirked at that once. The one time I remember ever having any confirmation of his residency in our building was when he was coming in as I was leaving for work, my hands busy with travel mugs and tote bags. "Hard night, Cat? Here you go. Come on in." The door swung open and, as Cat wove his way between my ankles and in, I heard a voice from above: "Hey, thanks." I looked up and a blonde woman waved briefly and was gone. So Cat really did belong to someone. I kind of preferred thinking that Cat was like me...a free agent, attached to no one, a loner, a maverick. But no...even Cat had a home.

Cat's gone now. The blonde lady left at the beginning of the month and took him with. I watched her load her things into a pickup truck in the alley and secretly hoped that Cat was keeping himself away and wouldn't return until after she had gone. I envisioned the woman, in cutoff jeans shorts, standing in the alley yelling "CAT!" as someone impatiently honked the pickup truck's horn. In my fantasy, I saw her face in the back window of the receding truck as Cat emerged from behind a dumpster, watched the truck round the corner, and then walked up the stairs to wait for me to come out. But that's not what happened. Cat's just gone.

Losing Algiers

Last night, I went out with SB Thursday to a bar that I had been to with both Shaun and Harold before. I have determined that when you take your THIRD boy to any given place that you have visited with prior boys, it ceases to become attached to them at all and becomes YOUR place. Shaun introduced me to it, I danced there with Harold, but SB Thursday helped me to make it my place. My cheap-ass burgers, my PBR, my brash and loud lady bartender with arm tattoos and a gold tooth right in front. MINE.

I've been doing pretty well with the whole Harold thing until today when I realized that, in losing this relationship, I lost my lovely memories of New Orleans. When Harold and I walked around the supernaturally quiet streets of Algiers, part of the sunlight and the flowers and the quiet embedded itself into me and became a permanent kind of benchmark. Whenever someone mentions New Orleans, I will think of Algiers and of kissing Harold on the cheek on the ferry ride back. I will think of how my T-shirt stuck to my back as I chased the sunset down Chartres St to meet Harold at the Cafe Marigny. I will remember how he reached for my hand as we walked along Dumaine Street on the morning we left, and how awkward, yet not unpleasant, it felt. We were the last two people from our group to leave, and he took me to the Clover Cafe for breakfast, which I hadn't anticipated or even wanted. I didn't think I would see him in the morning. I didn't intend for him to hold my hand and smile at me and I certainly didn't intend to smile back. We sat next to each other on the flight back and said our goodbyes before we got through security. I picked up my bag from the carousel and did my best to think of my memories of Harold in New Orleans as nothing more than souvenirs.

That's something about Harold...every time we had to part company, it felt like the last time I would see him. I have always kissed him and waved while thinking "Well, that's that. Let's move on." It was only this last time, this past weekend, that made me think otherwise. Is that the lesson I'm supposed to learn? That they only come back to you if you don't think they will?

So, if I don't want to be reminded of Harold, I can't be reminded of New Orleans at all. I am saddest about Algiers, though. The houses dripping with vines and the flowers and the fact that it seemed emptied of everyone save he and I... You only get a few perfect afternoons in your life, and that was one of mine.

If only I could reclaim it as MY place, but I don't have the strength of heart to take two more boys to Algiers.

Thank you for playing...

That man is not my life, apparently. In a three hour phone conversation last night, Harold (New Orleans Boy's real name...I will save real names for those who disappoint me) told me he wasn't coming to Chicago because he didn't think he could give me the kind of relationship I "wanted." In talking with him, it became apparent that he was just fucking scared. He's scared of changing his life even though he himself says he doesn't like what's happening in it. He's scared of caring too deeply for someone in case they challenge him to do better or be better. He's afraid of fucking everything. So I said to him, "Well, Harold, looks like you win. You get to keep everything the way it is. Too bad all that is just a consolation prize, though." I said I didn't want to be his "friend." I have plenty of friends and not a single goddamn one of them is a coward like him. The last thing I said was "You're either going to have to jump or die with regrets. Goodbye."

In the distance, in the darkness, I heard a motorcycle roar by as if the universe had to remind me how poor my decision making skills have been in the arena of relationships. Thanks, Universe. Do I get a year's supply of Turtle Wax, too?

Not in Kansas anymore

Last night, I dreamed about tornadoes. I have had nightmares about outrunning tornadoes all my life, and they usually have the same pattern: I'm in a car/outside when I notice a funnel cloud touching down nearby. I run/drive towards a faroff shelter. I get to the shelter just as the tornado is about to suck me up or drive the various molecules that make up my body through a tree trunk. Then, I wake up, not knowing whether or not I made it safely into the shelter. On occasion, I do get sucked up, and sometimes I actually make it through the storm. It's been a long time since I had one of those dreams, which are loosely translated as meaning that events in my life seem to my subconscious to be spinning out of control. I personally blame my dream on the torrential downpour and monumental thunderstorm that raged on most of last night. Well, that and the tequila.

In my dream, I was driving with my friends Ian and Rebecca from college. I haven't seen either of them in years, but there we were, in Ian's beat up car, driving through the midwest. We only rode together in that car once, I believe, in real life... I had just broken up with a very cold, very clinical man and I begged Ian to drive me to the mall so that I could be around floor tile and people. Unfettered commercialism seems to perk me right up when I'm blue... Rebecca suggested a game of "Try on whatever ghastly prom dress Ian picks out for us" which was delightful, especially when one of the choices that Rebecca was given made her look like an asthmatic cocktail shrimp. But that was the only time that the three of us ever rode together in the gold-painted shitbox that was Ian's transportation.

So, we were driving, and this wall of storm rose up in front of us. Rebecca saw the funnel first and I pointed out a nearby crafts store (which was housed in a barn...very New England-y...here in the midwest, we use our barns for barn stuff, damn it) for us to take refuge in. For some inexplicable reason, the woman who ran the crafts store (think Edie McClurg) took us to her car, which was an intact version of Ian's and drove us back out into the storm. I have a vivid recollection of watching out the back window and seeing doors, livestock and farm implements flying around in the wind disturbingly close to us. Then, suddenly, we were at an elevated train station. Crafts lady parked her car next to a brick building, and Ian went up on the platform to wait out the storm. Suddenly, there was no storm, no tornado and no weather at all. Then, of course, the damn dream got weird. Some pus-faced elementary school gangster burned me with a road flare and I woke up when I punched him in the back.

I am at a loss as to what it means. Any insight would be appreciated.

This is what it is like, or what it is like in words...

Words, Wide Night
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.
La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this
is what it is like or what it is like in words. - Carol Ann Duffy

I said it. At approximately 10:30 in the morning on Saturday, July 31, 2004, I stopped New Orleans Boy on the sidewalk outside of my apartment and said "I love you." We were on our way to a garage sale that turned out to be rather disappointing and I just said it. I said it, I hugged him, and I kept walking to the garage sale because I didn't want him to think that I expected to hear the same back from him. I'll give him time to make up his mind. But, truthfully, probably not much.

I met him at the subway station at O'Hare. His plane got in early and I woke up late, so we met on the platform between two trains as I disembarked with my knitting in one hand and an empty diet Pepsi in the other. He smiled at me and I thought "Dear God. This man is the rest of my life. I will marry him. I'm going to have his babies. We will have a joint checking account and a mortgage. This man is the rest of my life." I spent the whole weekend trying to keep my certainty from him, though. Frankly, if anyone were to share that kind of information with me, I would run away and change my name. Even if that someone were Christian Bale.

How to describe the weekend without making those of you with weak stomachs vomit...It was calm. Nothing in my life is ever calm as I tend to feel purposeless and weird if there isn't a constant hurricane of superfluous action around me, but the weekend was actually calm. It was calm because of New Orleans Boy this time instead of despite him, like his last visit. The only thing that mattered to me was being with him, even when we were being quiet. When he left, I cried and I cried so much so that people on the El looked at me funny. Then again, you don't usually see a crying woman with bad skin furiously knitting on the subway.

Now comes the long wait for New Orleans Boy to decide whether or not he's ready to uproot his life in New York to come out here to a great and vast unknown. When I'm the only constant in any equation, you know you're dealing with the Devil's Own Algebra. He has twelve years in New York...twelve years, an apartment he owns, his family and all of his business contacts. In Chicago...well, there's me.

He hasn't said "I love you" back to me yet. But he will. This man is the rest of my life.