Lessons
Posted on | June 5, 2013 | No Comments
He was late because his bike chain broke and I was late because I left my phone at home and wasn’t sure if we were still meeting. When we both finally saw each other under the overpass, he was half a block away.
Come here, he gestured. And after a teenage groan of reluctance, I threw down my board and skated towards him for what felt like an awkward eternity. As he watched my form – my knees not bent enough, my center of gravity too high – I felt like I could die of wobbly embarrassment under his gaze.
“I have to share something before we start,” I said when I finally arrived.
…Okay.
“I have a friend – well, a roommate of a friend – who is a statistician and sports fanatic. So, like, when he was getting his PhD, he studied horse racing for some project and found out that if girl horses race against each other they each do so well. And if boy horses race against each other they each do so well. But if boy horses races against a girl horse, the boy horse does better than when he raced against the other boy horses and the girl horse does worse than when she just raced against the other girl horses.”
“I just needed to share that.”
We stood next to each other with cars rumbling overhead. One foot on the floor and the other on the pavement.
He blinked and stared at the middle distance above my head.
Well I have good news.
“Oh?”
We’re not horses.
Terms of Engagement
Posted on | June 4, 2013 | No Comments
I had met R less than an hour before we broke off from the Ngabe inauguration party procession and went skinny dipping.
G introduced us at the height of my attempt to speak Spanish while on vacation. He was barefoot, long haired, grizzly bearded, and wearing a purple polo shirt. I filled our conversational silences with entonces and madlibbed French before he revealed his secret identity as a sun-worn gringo who spent the last eight years in South and Central America. Of course, this explained the ease to our conversation – from one expat (him) to one former expat (me) – that continued in English as R and I crossed a bridge, peered at the river below, and impulsively lowered ourselves down the ravine. Read more
Fundamentals of Dating
Posted on | April 22, 2013 | No Comments
C.
“But they’re not real models,” he chimed in.
We were having one of those how-are-you-how-has-your-day-been conversations and the conversation had veered towards work. I was sharing about my life at the restaurant, wondering aloud how I had managed to gain employment alongside such beautiful coworkers more than nine months ago.
“Yes they are,” I replied. “they have legit agencies and do fashion weeks and appear in commercials and everything.”
“No they’re not,” he insisted.
“Let’s just say if they were real models, they wouldn’t also have to work in a restaurant.”
It would take me hours to figure out what troubled me.
And that was: by his transitive property, I wasn’t a real actress either.
***
T.
“I just like hanging out with you and want to spend more time with you.”
It was one of those first exceptionally cool, crisp nights of Spring. It was surprisingly easy to find myself in a bar with him, then another, drinking whiskey, Irish exiting before last call and then insisting he return for his hat. We caught a cab back to the same borough where we met and both lived. He said this after he paid and before he got out. It was the way he looked in that moment, easy, uninhibited and true, that hooked me.
Fast forward to early April and we were still trying to make follow up plans. “Later this week,” he had assured me when I bumped into him last. Until this point, our next hang had been cancelled, rescheduled, postponed, declined, and re-offered. “Which day/s were you thinking?” I had texted, trying to narrow the time field and make room for plans with friends.
His response: “when I have time / feel up to it.”
If a statement is true, that means its contrapositive is also true.
Therefore:
He did not have the time.
He did not feel up to it.
And if actions speak louder than words, perhaps he never did.
***
A.
When it comes to flirting, I have the grace of a lobster trying to sip an espresso and yes, you read that sentence correctly.
In fact, I wasn’t even aware I was flirting with him until he flirted back.
To be honest, I had considered him before – but he had been in my orbit only briefly. And as time passed and distance grew, it seemed an anomaly that we had even crossed at all.
In our latest exchange, it struck me what a gentleman he had always been in entertaining my tomfoolery. But a girlfriend reminded me: it is easy to be a gentleman when the differences in our time zones preclude any follow-through. And while those miles could narrow with time, I know him to be in the gifted and talented program of adulthood …and I’m not sure he has the patience for this slow reader.
He may be emotionally available, but he is physically unavailable.
And, she reminded me: unavailable is unavailable.
Last Week
Posted on | April 21, 2013 | No Comments
Last week. Last week.
One night I saw a fire on 12th street on my way home from work. It was started by a discarded cigarette and killed an 84 year old woman.
On another evening I saw an unconscious man on the subway tracks.
Then Friday – that Friday – afternoon, I saw a high school kid sitting with his legs dangling over the subway platform ledge. The next train was 2 minutes away. He was showing off for his friends, who were catching the subway in the opposite direction.
It took all my willpower not rip out my earbuds and scream at him before he scooped himself up at the very last minute.
***
When my father was almost sixty, he was run over by a pick-up truck.
He was a small business owner and for the weeks and months prior to this event, merchandise had been steadily missing from his warehouse.
I was in college and my mother would mention this to me casually on the phone. She would lament how the thieves had always somehow managed to evade the security cameras and how they didn’t know what to do.
One day, however, my father happened to see an unknown vehicle at the building’s back entrance. Two men were hauling merchandise off pallets. He realized they were the thieves and approached.
They saw him, too. And they got into their truck and hit reverse – backed into him, over him, again, and drove away.
No one saw this happen. No one heard my dad.
After a few moments he walked himself into the warehouse offices – bloody, clothes torn – and called for my mother, not allowing anyone to touch him until she arrived.
The possibility of death was implied, unspoken.
And the first thing he had her do was write down the truck’s license plate number.
He survived.
When I heard double amputee Jeff Bauman positively identified one of the Boston suspects, I remembered my father and thought, of course he did.
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