First off, I guess I should address my absence from writing for the past couple months. I've been busy, with it being water polo season. I've also been living in this quasi-reality of a friendship(relationship?) that's had my brain absolutely shut down. I have literally been that confused. And I don't like to write down my thoughts until they've been thoroughly collected and analyzed. I was also ashamed for some reason... ashamed of what, I don't really know. But I felt like my life wasn't worth talking about.
Ironically, Remedio's name (it's a fake one) is the exact name we discussed I could never name my child. He absolutely hates that name. It's the male version of a name in one of my favorite novels (100 Years of Solitude). He can suck it. I still like the name.
A synopsis of the saga will follow:
December: We texted each other every single day. This guy literally knows everything about me (besides what I choose to do with no clothes on, he doesn't get to know that.) He knows about my crazy side of the family - Dad's - and I know how his parents met. I can't explain how absolutely nervous I was when I saw him for the first time in...
January: What a confusing ass month. The first day back to school we were supposed to meet up and buy our books together, but I had a class from 2-3:30 after he was done with his last class. So... he came and got a terrifying please-drop-this-class lecture from my geology professor with me. No one has ever come to class with me before. Normal? Then we bought our books together and ate lunch and played Trivial pursuit on my phone... aka his obsession for the next month. He's actually quite terrible at it. He made breakfast for me, we went and volunteered together, we got lunch all the time (and subsequently harassed by a homeless guy who thought we were together), and it felt like things were going in a more serious direction.
Stupid little things. The way he squeezes my shoulders when I'm sitting down and he walks by. That he never forgets to answer my texts. That he remembers small things, like that I don't eat beef. That he laughs off the way I trip all the time and make fun of myself. That he lets me rant about Latin American politics or Roe v. Wade or whatever I want for an unlimited amount of time. That when we text really late at night, he always says I love you. That when I'm mad he always says he loves me, even though he knows it makes me crazy. Stupid little things.
February road bump: I don't really know what happened. Well, he started acting like a douche. He'd bail on me when I had only made plans the day before with him, then call me a couple hours later to see if I wanted to hang out. He'd say he was busy on the day we always had lunch. We had our first fight - that he didn't ever take his phone downtown with him ("What if something happened to you? What if you got in a fight? What if the entire bar suddenly exploded? We wouldn't know what had happened to you!"). I was fed up with being treated as an in-between. Did he care about me or did he not? It all culminated into a furious phone call at 3 in the morning after he had dropped me off, after I found out he had gone on a date with a girl he "really liked." Didn't he really like me? To spend so much time together and talking? I suddenly felt very unhinged. The person whom I leaned on most was leaning on someone else... I can't really remember exactly what I yelled at him about, but it was something to the extent of him abandoning me for this what's-her-face girl that didn't care about him. A couple days later, we talked for a long time (mainly me chastising him for all of the crimes he'd committed in the last few weeks) and he told me he loved me only as a friend. That he had been backing away and not hanging out with me because he was afraid of my feelings but that he "hadn't given me any mixed signals." I was kind, but pissed.
March: I didn't talk to him for a week. He texted me "hey" and it made me want to talk to him even less. On my last day with my swimmers (I got "let go" from my job by the way, yippee) he came down on the pool deck and kept hugging me in front of my kids (awkward) and scared the living daylights out of them by him... just being him. Later that week I met up with him and more of our friends. It wasn't weird and the next morning I knew he was the person to call (partially because he's a nice guy, partially because I'm sure he felt very guilty about how he'd been behaving) when I was literally contemplating going to the hospital because I had drank too much/been dehydrated. Boom. Saltines, Gatorade, and anti-nausea meds. He always does whatever I ask him.
Now we're up to date with each other, blog.
There was of course some nice hefty drama Saturday night (would it be Saturday night, otherwise?). I, being my naive little self, thought when I walked through the door to a welcoming crowd of 8 hammered boys, "I can handle this." My dreams of a fun night with a coed group of friends downtown were probably shattered when one of these three things occurred: hearing: "YOU'RE LOOKING SEXY TONIGHT!" when I walked through the door, seeing my friend throw a full beer bottle up two stories and smash into someone's door, or when I was offered Mederma as an appropriate method for balming the lips.
We waited for the bus for a long time, where I watched Remedio kiss our guy friend on the forehead repeatedly, discussed how I was going to get pinched in the ass by everyone downtown (which, incidentally, it only ended up being him... ha), and was bear hugged more times than I can accurately recall. Confusing was that he told me he loved me - "I loooove you best friend! I hope you love me too!" - and after I made some (undoubtedly witty and hilarious) joke "I like you." What does it all mean, you say. Hell if I know.
Next came the grope-me-a-thon once we got downtown. As one would suspect, we quickly lost the majority of the members of our group (some never to return.) I was left with Tommy and Remedio. Tommy was texting his girlfriend, one of my teammates, the whole time, and was walking really slowly. Remedio had his hands on my waist the whole walk towards 6th street, at one point literally grabbing my waist and resting his head on my ass. I do not know if this was a compliment. I simply reminded him of it the next day and said I wish I had photo proof of him kissing my ass. He also repeatedly pinched my ass and acted like we hadn't discussed that I had green on my earrings an hour before. Once we got to 6th street, he thought it would be a clever idea to grab the belt on my dress and I would become some sort of leader of a pack of drunken sled dogs. "Haha this looks dirty" - yes, thank you for pointing that out.
Eventually I lost them to the gods of alcohol and a girlfriend with a car and was left with the beer thrower asking me to make out with him ("Well you have before..." - not a sufficient argument, especially since one of those times I was not conscious.) Two a.m. rolled around and we had no way home. So we walked. And I yelled at everyone via text whom I considered responsible for my walking twenty blocks in bare feet at 3 in the morning. Anger. Pure, unadulterated anger.
But wait! There's more. Coincidentally, the next day, pictures from his birthday from three months ago were put up on Facebook. Thankfully the ones of me getting iced and chugging with three boys or of me dancing on top of a table didn't make it up there. But this one, super, mega awkward one of us dancing did. Thankfully I look hot. But also quite trashy. Like, drinking a beer, grinding on him, while he is doing some sort of thing that requires his face on my neck. Don't remember taking that photo.
Monday rolls around and he asks me to dinner. (Uh, I have practice ya know.) I make him wait til 9 to go with me and we have a really good time just talking about how we were as kids, if he's going back to Venezuela ever (apparently he has political asylum here right now, so no), and I ranted about how they want to take away a woman's right to use birth control how she chooses don'tjudgeme and he listened. And then he paid for dinner, which has never, ever happened before.
Wrench in the whole operation: there's another girl. They met in Physics, she has curly brown hair and blue eyes (like another breathtakingly gorgeous supermodel I happen to know), and he seems to want to be with her, or rather did when he wasn't being handsy. He told me he planned to ask her to be his girlfriend this week.
Thankfully, I like her. If she were a complete bitch or way ugly I'd probably be pissed. Sadly, the rest of our friends don't like her for various reasons ("She doesn't act excited to be with him" "She tried to get with me" "If they met in Physics they'll have nothing in common besides that" yadda yadda yadda) but I like her just fine. But now I feel compromised. Not that I have loyalties to her as a friend, but that I'm a part of something dishonest. If I were her and knew, I'd feel so threatened and hate me right now. Doesn't he understand?
Normal friends don't act like us.
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