FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

I was on my bed with HCE stretched out next to me.

“But we made out four weekends ago.” She propped herself up on her elbow to look at me. “So it has to be our anniversary this weekend, right?”

I took my hand off her hip and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “This is ridiculous,” I subvocalize.

“No, you pick! We have to have an anniversary date. Honestly.” She rolls onto her back while I roll my eyes.

“Be a man,” I say, louder.

She covers the phone and shushes me. “He is!” she says. Then, back into the phone: “Sorry, a suitemate is being noisy. I’m just saying, you can’t have it both ways. You have to pick a date for us to celebrate our anniversary on.”

“I think YOU are.” I say, and reach for her crotch because I want to pretend to check, but also because it’s a crotch. She squeals and sits up.

“Can I call you tomorrow? Something fun is happening here now.” She hangs up with her boyfriend then, who still isn’t me. This is a fact that obviously is failing to bother me to a spectacular degree at that particular moment.

“Okay, mister.”

“What?”

“Please wait until I’m not on the phone with my boyfriend to molest me. It’s just not cricket otherwise.”

“First of all, talk to your boyfriend on your own damn bed. Second of all, I don’t molest you, I just gaze longingly.”

“This is my bed too for this entire week. Now move, I need to change shirts. Don’t look.”

—

In May of 2003, I came to briefly live with a girl I loved but who was dating someone else.

After too few weeks, Hot Copy Editor was regularly dating that boy she had invited to make out with her. I didn’t like him. Where the old Boyfriend had been Tatooine’s smoldering heat, the New Boyfriend was Hoth’s icy stoicism. He bored me.

“He’s boring,” I said.

“Are you listening to me?” she asked. “So they absolutely won’t give me an extension. I’ll have to move out into the street until my lease starts. I’ll be homeless and destitute!”

“Well why don’t you stay with me for a week?” I asked. “My roommates won’t mind.”

My roommates minded. “Justin, that devil girl is absolutely not moving into this apartment.”

“Aw, c’mon, guys, she has no place to stay. She’ll just stay in my room most of the time and she’s absolutely no trouble to take care of. Plus she already promised to do dishes.”

One roommate leaned forward. “I’m interested,” he said.

“Well, this way we could watch her destroy him firsthand. Think of it as ringside seats.”

“Okay, Justin, it’s a deal.”

—

I was as happy as a kidnapped clam with Stockholm syndrome.

There are things about having a girl wash dishes while you dry, fundamental species-consciousness things, things that engage the parts of my brain that are in my chest and that have been hollow so long I forget they’re there until they aren’t hollow for a few soapy minutes any more. Maybe at first you’re arguing about grammar, but before long incidental task-related physical contact devolves into soapsud attacks and water flicking, until you’re mock-angrily facing each other and the only reason you haven’t dissolved into a sudsy puddle of makeout on the kitchen floor is a flickering pilot-light of awareness that one of the two of you has a boyfriend.

This is the sort of ridiculousness that took place all week long. She whispered in my ear to distract me while I took a practice LSAT, ostensibly as some sort of distractibility resistance training, but mostly because it’s fun to whisper in a dude’s ear. I bet her that I could take her bra off with one hand one night, and she let me get my hand all the way up the back of her shirt, our faces close together and my other hand on her shoulder, until one of my roommates stumbled past the open door to my room and we guiltily separated, as though that were the line, that was the point where we grew consciences.

Why wouldn’t I assume that the new boyfriend was only temporary?

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

My whole world was just about complete.

Well, except for that HCE wasn’t actually really dating me. Yet. We went out on weekends and saw movies and had dinner, and we chatted online constantly and talked on the phone, plus we wrote notes to each other in class in the form of haikus where we told each other that the other one was cute. But, other than that, no. We weren’t dating.

Plus, I was busy limping out of school with the minimum possible academic performance. If collegiate (and subsequent) experience has taught me anything, it is this: if something comes so easily to you that you can rush through your homework and never study, which to you is a fantastic deal because you don’t really enjoy it much and want to get on to something else as soon as possible, that thing is not the sort of thing that you’d best choose as a major in college. “Wow,” you want to say of your chosen field. “I could listen to old people drone about this subject for hours! Then I want to rush to the bookstore and drop hundreds of dollars on hardback books about it that I will want to actually kind of skim!” If that is not you, then I hope you either prefer used books, or you are good at forcing yourself to do things that you find at least mildly unpleasant, which frankly is a useful skill that you wish I would acquire so that you could actually read this blog instead of refreshing it in vain. Well, college also taught me that wings and beer go great together.

Oh, there were other details. The Cavs lost a ridiculous number of basketball games. Winter in Cleveland aimed a few final kicks into Spring’s gut as she lay curled in pain on a Parma sidewalk before he took her purse, turned, and stumbled off, drunk, to sleep off another hangover. I was not getting any better at knitting.

But other than that, HCE was single, and I was single, and we spent all our time together, and so what could go wrong?

—

“I don’t think this boy is going to come make out with me,” HCE said.

Whoa. What? This wasn’t one of our typical conversations about ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends, sex, literature, movies, school, politics, activism, dating, the campus newspaper, the administration, public displays of affection, private displays of affection, music, our childhoods, sports, board games, liquor, parties, Cleveland, fashion, or anything having anything to do with what we’re doing this weekend. I was on new ground and completely lost.

“Boy?” I said, playing it cool.

“The one from our softball team. I told him I wanted him to come make out with me, and I don’t know what I’m going to do if he doesn’t.”

I can think of a few ideas that I’d like to try, I thought. The filter let it through. “I can think of a few ideas that I’d like to try,” I said.

“No, you stay put. How’m I supposed to make out with him if he shows up and you’re here?”

You’re not supposed to make out with him, you’re supposed to make out with me, a fact which I will share with him emphatically if he needs convincing, I thought. The filter caught this one. “Okay,” I said, confused. Maybe she needs a rebound makeout. It isn’t as though I’m going anywhere.

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

Deep breath. Okay, another.

The professor is swimming in the front of the class, nattering about the difference between GDP and GNP. HCE is scribbling something in my notebook.

I could still throw up
It’s “Regurgitation Day”
I won’t if you won’t.

Waking up still drunk and going to class anyway wasn’t something I did a hell of a lot of in college, partially because our college was less fun than a pocket calculator with a personality disorder, and also because I didn’t go to a tremendous quantity of classes in the first place. That is, unless a certain someone was going to sit next to me and write haikus at me all class long. Especially if both you and that someone are coincidentally now single. I picked up the pen.

I lost at scrabble
And drank way too much vodka
I forgot the rest.

Class ended only moments before I would have had to abandon my pride and rush the door for fresh air. HCE and I wobbled out to a bench to watch the campus go by and continue the sobering process.

A cute girl smiled about two meters to my right, which I construed to mean she was smiling at me. I ignored her and turned back to HCE.

“I think girls can tell when you’re broken up,” I said. “An adorable geek-looking girl said hello to me cheerfully on the way to class earlier.”

“Justin, just look at yourself. You’re exactly what a geek-looking girl wants.”

I looked down at my too-small T-shirt and skinny jeans. “I guess so. I felt like wearing something you could count ribs through.”

“Also, of course they can tell when you’ve broken up. We can sense misery. That’s when we know to pounce.”

I laughed and looked away. My uncertainty of the previous night had melted into the buzzy haze of daylight. HCE just needs time, I thought, like still-scalding waffles right from the waffle iron. She asked out her last boyfriend, and I’m sure she’ll ask me out too, so all I need to do now is to be normal and cool and secure and unpushy.

I got my chance to be cool right away. Ex-Boyfriend appeared, striding directly towards us across the grass. I had a pretty good idea what those two were going to talk about, and I didn’t want to be a part of it, so I made myself scarce.

Just give her some space, I thought again. She’ll be my girl in no time.

Look, I know it’s been a while, and I know I didn’t call or write, and I’m sorry. Though it’s little consolation, I want you to know that I thought about you constantly. I only saw other people like half a dozen times, and frankly I didn’t enjoy it and missed you.

There were lots of reasons not to write the blog, virtually none of which I can describe in detail without continuing the extended metaphor much further than is approved by the FDA for human daily allowance of metaphor. However, I do realize that I won’t get out of this week’s blog post alive without hitting three more things:

1. Yes, I am 100% single.
2. INAD resumes in a week. Buckle up.
3. I swear I wrote an awkward thing for today, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where the hell I saved it. But I promised myself that I’d post about girls today, and post I shall. Here’s a brief little vignette that I jotted down on a business trip a while ago.

—

I leaned forward. She looked up at me.

“Let’s build a campfire right here between these benches,” I said to her. She shivered and giggled. “We’ll get some marshmallows and sticks and camp out. Are you in?”

She nodded and giggled again. “Once, when the power was out, I roasted a marshmallow with a candle! It took like an hour.”

She was another single serving friend from the airport, a cute and bubbly freckled blonde sophomore engineer at Lehigh who was trying to get to Allentown, departing gate F17. She wore purple but liked pink. I was on my way back from recruiting in Cleveland, departing to Richmond from gate F16. We were both trapped in Philadelphia for an hour and a half with nothing to do but pretend to ignore each other when we weren’t subtly flirting, not for keeps but just for the hell of it. It sure beats not quite making eye contact with anyone while hoping to get out of the stupid airport.

I’m not even going to pretend that this post was about how I talked to a random person, humanity was connected together, how happy we’d be if we understood strangers, and so forth. I mean, it originally was about that. How we should reach out as a country to our brother man and lift him up.

Seriously. Lets be honest with ourselves. If you have a floral skirt on and smile a lot, you’re a lot more interesting to me than my brother man.

Okay. You didn’t want to do any work today anyway. But rather than fire directly into Part 4 of an ongoing story or take a shot at transcribing any pent up awkward things of which I have several, let’s do a long-overdue Q&A mailbag. The rules: questions, comments, insults, and search keywords that someone used to find the website will be in bold. The silken lyrics of forgotten love songs, which may or may not be awkward, will be in regular type.

It is not is surprise to see that quirky yet relatable blogs like Awkward Things I Say To Girls ran away with Funniest Blog and Most Addicting Blog…
—Jon Baliles

The nice thing about Q&A blog posts is that I get to pick any Q I want, including ones that Alex Trebek would never allow. Especially ones that are not in the form of a question and talk about how awesome I am. Thanks to all of you who nominated and voted for me in the first Richmond Blog Awards. Your check and autographed picture should arrive in the mail shortly. In the meantime, I have begun to wear a name tag that says “Hello, I am the funniest, most addicting man in Richmond” whenever I go to a bar to hit on girls. It isn’t awkward at all.

Congratulations to all of the rest of the winners also. I’m proud to be a part of the diverse and maturing Richmond Blog scene.

If I’m in the friend zone, why does she flirt with me?
—Search term

She flirts with you because you’re a fun person to flirt with and she likes the attention, and maybe because you’re misreading the situation and she wants to go out with you. Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to post for a while. Those especially committed procrastinators who have any sort of maternal or paternal mentoring-type feelings stirring deep inside themselves, assuming they’re sure it isn’t morning sickness or indigestion, respectively, may want to click on over to the comments section of what has become one of the most popular posts on the site, pageview wise: Getting Out of the Friend Zone: The Easy Way.

Those of us who have commented there have become a close bunch, like an organized crime family who has also travelled cross-country in a van. But there are unanswered questions, such as “how” and “what if.” There are feelings oozing out of the confining rectilinearity of the “submit comment” box. For some reason, feelings seem to hit my readership right in its wheelhouse.

When’s the book version coming up?
—jesstagirl

When I get paid to write, you will get your book. In the meantime you get INAD chapters whenever I can anesthetize myself enough to perform the necessary autovivisection. For example, I wrote one of the more recent chapters after seeing The Notebook, which I don’t want to talk about for emotional reasons except to say, with a controlled expression and distant stare, that it reminded me of something. You also get some facts. Here they are:

• INAD is about 15,000 words so far in total, which I hear works out to be 60 pages.
• The entire story has five parts, of which I have completed three.
• I think there are 16 more chapters between the remaining two parts.
• Writing it out helps.

“Could you have another chance after you rejected a guy?”
—Search term

Almost all of my high-pressure adolescent girl-related moments were accompanied by the vivid sensation of falling. “Will you go to the Eighth Grade Dance with me?” I asked the tall, quiet, and smart girl that I happened to have a huge crush on when I had just turned 14. I couldn’t support my body, though, so even though an early growth spurt had kept me lanky, I found myself looking almost up into her eyes from a half slouch against the wall of the cafeteria next to the little school-supply store where you could buy pencils and notebook paper during lunch.

“No.” By the tenth grade, girls had started to append an apology to the ends of their rejections, but I guess eighth graders hadn’t learned that yet. I didn’t even feel that bad about it though. I just picked myself up off the wall and went on with my lunch, running through my backup options.

But I didn’t need them after all. “Hey Justin,” said the girl in sixth period science class. “Some people are going together to the dance in like a group. I mean, you can come with me to that if you want. Do you want to?”

I don’t mind if I do, I thought, and wondered idly how awesome I was to have convinced her to un-reject me. I did all the date things, like giving her a corsage that matched her dress and dancing with her a few times. But after the stiffest dances I’ve ever danced with any girl it was undesirably clear, like a Filipino Monkey transmission into my brain, that she had no interest in me after all and that my inclusion in the group, while not unappreciated by others (who danced with me multiple times), had more to do with the immutable set theory of dance-date monogamy than with the girl actually, like, liking me.

That wasn’t the first time that kind of thing happened to me, and I’m sure lots of guys have similar experiences. This makes us wary. But if I ask someone out, I did it because I was interested in them, and interest has a way of not fading as quickly as you’d want it to.

So, uh, the answer is “Yes.” Sorry. I guess that was a parable.

Are you awkward?
—Search term

Yes. Yes I am.

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

I broke her gaze and looked down at the box of relationship-droppings, outside her dorm room. “You broke up with him.” Junior Midshipman Obvious, sir, reporting for duty aboard the USS No Kidding. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine as soon as I get everything that was his out of my life,” HCE said. “Here, you can help. Find his books in the shelf and put them in the box.”

“Which ones are his?”

“Which ones are stupid? At least give me some good news. How is your girlfriend?”

“The internship was great, but I’m not offering her a permanent position with the firm. I gave her the ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you’ speech today.”

HCE glanced up at me with a look I refused to try to interpret. “Really?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“As long as I’m here with the girl of my dreams, how could I not be?”

She giggled. “How do you feel about cheap vodka and Mountain Dew, to celebrate our emancipation? It’s all I have to drink, unfortunately, but it’s exactly what I feel like right now.”

“Rockin’. Let’s party like it’s 1863.”

The box packed and shifted to a remote corner of the suite, we deployed Scrabble on her bed and commenced punishing our taste buds. I hate Mountain Dew, but when mixed with cheap sick-feeling vodka, it was terrible and perfect.

“Why did you break up with her?” she asked.

I decided not to lie.

“I told her that I was in love with you instead, and I couldn’t date her anymore.” I felt detached. HCE’s laptop was playing jazz on her desk, giving heft to the subsequent silence.

She looked touched. “Why did you say that?”

I have found that there is a stable equilibrium associated with loving someone you can’t have. Every time HCE’s hair was in her eyes but I wasn’t brushing it out with my fingertips, every time she made me laugh so hard but I wasn’t telling her how it reminded me that I loved her, and every time I held her without trying to kiss her, I was creating a habit that, when restraint no longer became necessary, was tough to break.

Also, I’m an idiot.

I didn’t look her in the eye or move closer to take her hand. “It’s true. All I do is think about you,” I monotoned, motionlessly. I utterly failed to smile or press her close to my chest. My robot voice continued. “I couldn’t date someone else when you were right there.” I did not then pull away to look in her sparkling eyes, not pausing only long enough to gather a ragged breath before not bending down and kissing her lightly, then more deeply on the lips.

Nope, I pretty much just sat there and looked down as I said those things.

“Oh,” she said.

“But I think she took it pretty well.”

“Okay,” she said.

It was my move, so I stopped talking then.

She’s under a lot of stress, I thought. She can’t be expected to just jump right at another guy who says he loves her. I need to give her time and wait until she’s ready to be with me. Which will be inevitable.

Hours later, fully drunk and after losing to her in Scrabble enough times to seriously turn me on, we groggily climbed onto her bed to cuddle.

HCE flopped herself around to face me. “Justin,” she asked. “I miss him already.”

“Hush,” I said. “You did the right thing. You deserve someone better.”

“Aww!” she giggled. “You mean like you?”

“Uh,” I raised myself up on an elbow. “Not necessarily,” I heard myself say. I paused. Somewhere, deep within my soggy skull, the demonstrably miniscule part of my brain that knows how to get laid was, somehow, losing a fistfight to the section that knows how to be a helpless and pedantic antisocial nerd. “I wish I was able to convince you empirically of the extent to which you just needed to not date him anymore.”

“Subjunctive tense, Justin. You wish you were.”

“Whatever. I don’t want to bias you or anything. You just need someone who deserves you. He didn’t.”

“I need to pee.”

“You’re sweet.”

“No, you need to move, because I need to pee. Whoa. Oof, your elbow is not helping.”

At that time, it was around two in the morning.

Opinions differ about how close I was to kissing HCE that night in the spring of 2003. Some say it was just a matter of actually trying. A minority who know the situation more intimately dissent, citing HCE’s flirty attention-seeking nature.

Unfortunately, we will never know, because I’m about to do the stupidest thing since Napoleon invaded Russia, and at least we got a Tchaikovsky Overture out of that mistake. I didn’t get a damn thing.

As HCE wavered off to the bathroom, I caught her best friend and suitemate walking to her own room. “Hey,” I said. “Let me ask you a question.”

“Sure.”

“Now that we’re single, do you think a guy like me could get a girl like HCE?”

Land war in Asia. Taking the wind instead of the ball in overtime in the NFL. Removing the restraining bolt from a pre-owned droid just because he says it can help him retrieve more of some cryptic message. Who cares what a stupid friend thinks! Was my confidence really not able to handle this situation?

Well, if I have to ask, the answer is . . .

“No.” She shook her head. I looked away. The suitemate disappeared into her room and locked the door.

HCE reappeared, but my world was already crumbling along with my destroyed confidence. At some level, I believed it was true. “I have to go.” I said.

“What? No.”

“No, I don’t feel good.” I didn’t. “I need to get home, I think.”

The air outside was chilly and didn’t make me feel better. The ground was a boat. There wasn’t anyone on the roads as I walked home. Half a block from my apartment, on the quiet, residential street where I lived, the enormity of the prior moments became too heavy and I collapsed onto my hands and knees. I had gone from holding the girl I loved to deciding I wasn’t good enough for her in a few minutes, and what bothered me the most was that I was convinced it was right. She just wanted to be my friend, I thought, and I was wasting my time.

With tears on my face, I threw up into the grass next to the sidewalk.

A few seconds later, it started to rain. I gathered myself up, let myself into my apartment, and went to bed.

END OF PART III

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

I only spent a few nights up in Art School Girl’s cozy, strange bedroom at the top of the ancient house just off campus that she shared with three other people. It was Dumbledore’s office if he had been an art student, full of dark colors and smelling like home.

“What is this?” I said the first time I took a tour of her bedroom, pointing at spilled sand on the wood floor beneath a window.

“Don’t step in it! That’s a bird.” A bird? Oh. I noticed the tracks. “After I spilled sand one day, the bird got in and walked on it. I figured I’d just leave the tracks here.”

Or, a few nights later:

“Why is there a cloth over the television?”

“It just has a weird energy. My mom gave it to me, but I felt awkward with this gray gleaming eye staring at me all night. So I covered it up. I haven’t used it yet. I don’t know if I will. You remember my mom.”

I learned about her mother the morning that she (the mother) showed up early on a Saturday to take her daughter (ASG) to lunch, when I was just leaving from the previous night’s date. It wasn’t as awkward as you might think, because we were all adults. “Mom thinks you’re cute,” she said later, on the phone.

But just as I started spending significant time with someone else, things started falling apart between HCE and her boyfriend.

“It’s not the same anymore,” HCE would say, walking me home from class. “We’re going through the motions.”

“I can think of some fantastic motions you could try going through, if it would help things.”

“Hush. But then, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, and he’ll be reading in bed and playing with my hair, and then I just remember how much I feel for him.”

“What? That’s it? That’s all it takes to win your heart? Hang on, I’ve got a book in my bag somewhere. Slow down! I can’t reach your hair when you’re walking so fast.”

And she would laugh and run, and I’d chase her like a little kid. But we weren’t spending time together anymore, because I had dates to go on.

HCE even started to get that subtle, pained look that Harry got when Sally finally started dating again, just before he insisted it was great and told her to wear a skirt on her date. She (HCE) only acknowledged it once, on a weeknight in an instant message.

“I think I’m getting a crush on you,” she said.

I didn’t believe it for a second. “Sure you are,” I responded.

“I just can’t get you out of my head. Is the timing ever going to work out for us?”

“Maybe someday. But what about that guy you spend all of your time with? You know, the other guy you spend all of your time with who is not me.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

—

One Sunday morning in March of ‘03, I woke up late with a funny feeling in my stomach.

Today, HCE was going to break up with her boyfriend. I could feel it.

It was smelling snow before you open your eyes when it’s still dark. Sometimes you know these things before you know them. I decided that, if she was going to become single today, I’d better be single too.

I met ASG in the middle of campus and did it outside. She asked why I was breaking up with her, so I told her the truth.

“You’re in love with another girl.”

“Yes.” It was oddly dispassionate, like a layoff. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to let you go. It’s nothing personal. We just need to make some cuts.

“But you haven’t been cheating on me, have you?”

“No. I am not sure she even would want to date me. I think so, but I’m not sure.”

“Well, I just have to trust you on that. Regardless, I’m disappointed, Justin. I thought we could be really good.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m convinced that this is what I have to do.”

“Okay. Good night.” And she walked away.

I had a brief lurching moment of vertigo for what I’d just lost. It was gone immediately, replaced by a certainty that I was doing the right thing. This is all I’d wanted for almost a year. It was time to go talk to HCE. I was completely calm when I walked into her dorm, then her suite. I let myself in just like I had done a hundred times before.

She had put a cardboard box outside of her room, and was throwing things into it. That’s all I could see: things flying out of her room and into a box. A picture, then a few CDs. A scarf.

One of her suitemates jumped up from the couch. “Justin!” she yelped. “Oh geez, did you hear?”

Yes. “No.”

She came over to me so she could whisper. “She broke up with him. Just now. She got home and started throwing his things into a box.”

This wasn’t the dim fuzzy candlelight of romantic hunch, this was the Chicago Fire of Truth. My heart turned to lightning.

I stepped over the box and into her room. I looked into her deep velvety brown eyes, and, for a moment, nobody said anything.

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

“Finally,” I thought, as I leaned in to kiss her.

I specifically remember this particular kiss as being the first time I realized how much I like to draw out those brief intermediary moments when there’s a pause and your faces, eyes still closed, remain micrometers away but yet fully connected by the warmth and breath and anticipation, stretching those quick quarter-second kiss-intermissions that punctuate any normal makeout to ten seconds or more, until both of you are wound up so much that you’re unable to delay gratification any longer without being so full of adrenaline you burst.

It’s tough to describe without physically coming over and puckering up. Plus, the previous paragraph is guaranteed to be awkward or your money back. Who cares? I thought the kiss was spectacular, and I’m pretty sure she liked it, because, when I finally wrapped it up and stepped back, she whispered, eyes still closed, “Please, could you do that again?”

“Finally,” I repeated in my head. “This new girl is great. Who needs Hot Copy Editor when I’ve got someone else to kiss?”

—

Rewind a few weeks, to a nervewracking day after the poetry and pineapple had been delivered. My phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Evil birds? That’s the best you could come up with?”

That isn’t how I imagined this going. “I mean, I thought it was a pretty powerful image.”

“I love your movie reviews. But evil birds? Really?”

“So you, uh, you don’t have any other thoughts about the poetry you’d like to share?”

“Yes, mostly related to word choice. For example: respect? How dreadfully romantic. What was that all about?”

No, it’s fine. Yeah, no, I think it’s broken, but don’t worry. I’m pretty sure I can just take my heart back to the store, and they’ll mend it there.

“I mean, it seemed like the right word to me.”

“Yep. But come over tonight! One of the suitemates sliced up the pineapple and it’s the juiciest. Come have some. Ooh! Then we could go out!”

I wasn’t really devastated, though. It seems like I would be. I wouldn’t have written poetry like that unless there was a seriously inhibited emotional outburst that needed some alternate avenue of expression. Hearing her indirectly reject me ought to have caused me to confront the idea that I might just fail. She might not love me. I might not win her over in the end. Faced with such a confrontation of emotions, wouldn’t any rational person crumble and retreat?

I didn’t deal with it rationally. Because I wouldn’t just come out and tell her that I loved her and wanted her to be my girl, I didn’t have to face and deal with the fact that she wasn’t. I was wounded, but I figured I’d have my chance to try again when she was single.

—

I’m convinced that being freshly hurt makes me approximately as attractive to girls as if I were walking a puppy while holding a baby, playing guitar, and wearing a pink shirt.

A few days later, I attended an 80’s themed party dressed as John Bender. I went all-out, too. I rented the movie and studied the costume: the shaggy hair I already had at the time, but I went thrifting for the rest. When I was decked out, I felt like Danny Zuko punching Fonzie while stealing Rocky’s girlfriend. I felt cool.

That’s where I met Art School Girl. I was the least awkward I’ve ever been in my entire life. I don’t know if it was the cut off short sleeve plaid flannel button down, or the fingerless gloves, or the beer, but I couldn’t have said an awkward thing if you had put a gun to my head.

“Have I met you somewhere before?” I asked.

“Sure seems like it.” she said.

Fast forward twenty minutes. We’re dancing to the Go-Go’s. I couldn’t have said anything awkward if you had held Tina Fey to my head and forced me to. One of her tiny hands was on my bicep.

“I think it’s a good idea to work out.” I said. It’s true, I do think it’s a good idea. I also think it’s a good idea to get plenty of sleep and eat a balanced diet. I’m telling you, I was on fire. I could say no wrong.

“Let’s do some shots.” She pulled me into a dormroom where there was liquor and shot glasses. “Here, let me pour you one.” I did three quick shots, each of which were the approximate size of the Great Salt Lake.

I don’t remember much else about the night except for a lot of kissing and a ride home much, much later. As in, it was getting light outside later.

She was different and exotic and interesting. So I decided, hey – who needs Hot Copy Editor anyway? Finally I can move past her and be with someone else.

But, after a first real date and the first real goodnight kiss I described above, as I was thinking about how nice it was to focus my emotions on someone new who was not then and had never been a copy editor for a newspaper, somewhere deep inside myself I knew it wouldn’t last.

There was only one girl I wanted.

“What?!” I say to my friend sitting two stools down from me at the bar. “You can’t be hot without being smart. They’re like the same word.”

The waitress making a drink behind the bar snorts, smiles, and looks up at me. We make the kind of eye contact that only happens when two people connect at last, hungrily, across the endless void that leaves souls cold and alone.

This is important, because after briefly dating the nerdy girl who I had incidentally met several weeks before writing about her, I am single again. It’s okay, I’m fine with it. I’m balanced and stable and centered and ready to start awkwardly hitting on waitresses for your personal enjoyment. So here goes:

“We’re just talking about Miss South Carolina Teen.” I say.

“Oh gosh,” she says. “That poor kid. What kind of question was that, anyway?”

She was short and brunette, so, physically, she was pretty much my dream girl. She continued in a slow drawl that I chose to interpret as a deliciously timed and syrupy. “I watched the thing as it was happening. Most of the questions were idiotic.”

“Exactly!” I said to her, ignoring my friends utterly. They understand. My friends have met me before and encourage such behavior for their own entertainment. “I mean, answer this question right now: 15% of American kids can’t find the USA on a world map. What gives?”

“Uh. Well. Um. I guess give them maps? It’s a dumb question.” Again, she looked into my eyes and smiled, then started to walk away with the drinks.

“Exactly. See? I totally agree with you.” I totally agreed with her jeans as they walked away, swaying intoxicatingly.

I turned to my friends. “She likes me. Let’s have another drink.”

“She’s married. Let’s get out of here,” said the girl sitting next to me at the bar.

“What?”

“Yep. Big ol’ ring.”

“Son of a. I didn’t even check. Why do I always forget to check?”

“I could tell that you thought you had a little bit of a connection, so I checked for you. That’s what friends are for.”

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

“Justin, I can’t begin to describe how drunk I was…”

“Don’t even worry about it.”

“You think I’m dreadful. I’m so sorry for behaving like that.”

“Quiet. Listen: I have a few thoughts about the other night. I’ll write you a haiku.”

“Okay!”

The thing was, I absolutely and without reservation loved the hell out of that girl, but it just wasn’t that simple. There were complicated layers, like a well-made bed where someone had had a particularly violent nightmare. I felt like an uneducated heathen, clumsily hashing out emotions over AOL Instant Messanger while she was drunk and distracted by a passed out friend. You are supposed to do these things with poetry and flowers, right? So, with a concession to the global imbalance of labor conditions perpetuated by the flower trade, that’s exactly what I decided to do.

On the following Tuesday morning, a cute girl I vaguely knew waved at me in the science atrium as I was walking through. “Hey, Justin, what’s up?”

“Oh, you know. Not much. I’m telling this girl who is my best friend that I love her today.”

“You’re what?”

“Telling a girl that I love her. I told her before when she was drunk, but I’m doing it right this time. It’s all written out in a poem. Here, look – let me show you the pineapple I’m going to give her when I do it.”

“A pineapple?”

“Yeah. This girl thinks flowers exploit Central American children, and she always says she’s rather have some kind of American fruit. So I’ve got a pineapple for her. It’s from Hawaii.”

The girl looked at me strangely. “That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Well, typically they’re sweeter immediately after they’re picked, when…”

“Oh, Justin. I really hope it goes well.”

Economics class was torture, but that was not unusual, both for emotional and also pedagogical reasons. Hot Copy Editor and I typically amused each other by writing haikus and notes, her feminine, slanty, looped cursive alternating with my barbaric print. I was too nervous even for that. When the lecture was wrapping up, I couldn’t stand it any more.

“I have the haiku I told you I’d write about the other night.” I wrote in my notebook, showing it to her.

She leaned over to write on the same page. “Oo!” She used disposable fountain pens which made her letters glitter and hint at calligraphy.

I pulled some sheets out of my bag and put them on the desk in front of her, then drew an arrow to them in the top corner of my notebook page. They were neatly copied. I did the best I could.

HCE gave me a look, and swivelled to reach the notebook “But it’s so loooooooong!” Sure. Thirteen quatrains are a bit longer than a haiku, I guess.

“Seventeen syllables couldn’t get it done, kid.”

Class ended at that moment, so I pulled the pineapple out of my bag and thumped it down on top of the stapled pages. The professor glanced at me, then decided it wasn’t her business and looked away.

“And this is for you too!” I said.

“Justin…”

“Shush. Eat pineapple and read the poetry,” I said, and I left.

I had drafted out the poem in some blank pages of my notebook. I liked economics, so I kept and still have the notebook. For completeness, here is the poem in its entirety.

The haiku that I was to write
Has grown, to my chagrin, tonight.
But you’re a muse I can’t refuse
And now you’ll understand my plight.

I cross out words till I’ve no ink
I don’t know what to say and think
A year’s charade begins to fade
I go to pour another drink

Is it okay to love you yet?
The last few days make me forget.
My part I’ll play another day
For now I need no safety net.

I love, respect, and pine for you.
Believe me if you please; it’s true.
When I’m in bed you fill my head
With thoughts of things I wish to do.

But I know where your heart belongs
With him you’ll dance the slower songs
He loves your socks & shaggy locks
And you’re the girl for whom he longs.

So when you tell me “let’s make out”
I dearly wish to help you out
But I resist though you insist
‘Cause you prefer that other lout.

If only you were uglier
Your hair and wardrobe scuzzier
Another guy would walk right by
You’d still make me feel fuzzier.

But you’re the hottest girl I know
When you walk by you melt the snow
It sucks for me, ’cause I can see
Your brilliant, funny, inner glow.

I know I said I liked you less
I was unhappy, I confess
And all your words, like evil birds,
Had placed me in extreme duress.

But if I like you less than now
That might be better, you’ll allow
And in the end you’ll be my friend
If only I could find out how!

So for the moment, you remain
My favorite girl to entertain
It isn’t fair but I don’t care
I only have your love to gain.

The point is that I understand
That Friday night that no one planned
We both regret our words and yet
They’re far too late to countermand

So! I don’t want to hear you say
“I’m sorry.” You know it’s okay.
My love I’ll hide back deep inside
To give to you another day.