a batslie kind of day...

Our love was not immediate, no arrows through hearts or doodles in notebooks. No fooling ourselves or aggrandizing laments through cyberspace. It was hard earned and fought for; punctuated by periods of gripping anger, utter lassitude and acute affections. A meandering footpath.

I met her coming out of a year and half long relationship with yet another person who had kept me preened on a pedestal, and wouldn’t offer me a ladder to come down. He wanted me to live with him, and move to Atlanta, and I wanted us to move to Miami and have more threesomes. Just your everyday 20-something quarrel. And so I left. Contrary to any belief floating about, I didn’t leave because he hit me, or because I stray or because we were both prone to bouts of manic-depressive fits. I just wanted to be. Wanted to be alone. I still think of him fondly, smoking Camel cigarettes and wearing striped sweater vests.

She was a bartender at a Mexican restaurant that that serves shitty strong margaritas. I liked the way she walked, I liked her teeth. I liked how nice she was to people, even the assholes. She had nice Vans.

I got drunk enough to hit on her one day and she asked my friends and I to meet her at InCahoot’s. She kissed me there, even though I knocked over a barstool and said dumb things like “You just got ahold of me,” in response to a phone number request. I didn’t know that a week later she sat at the bar on her day off with her roommate, hoping that I would show up. Or that her ex-girlfriend worked with her and would start driving past our apartments, egging my car and starting fights with me at bars.

If you had told me she would break up with me for the summer and that I would fuck Laura’s boyfriend and someone’s new girlfriend would try to beat me up on my birthday that year, I might have stayed away.

But that’s why you don’t get to skip to the end, because then you don’t get three years of plays and fights and fucks and music and broken glass and feelings and slashed tires and time to figure out how to be with someone. Someone who, on the surface, may not look like the one. But she is my one.

Happy Anniversary.