Straight No Chaser

Winter's Cold, Spring Erases

everyone is pregnant but me. e colon sulk.

no, i mean, that's a good thing, still on track, no babies before graduation and such.

in the supplemental material to the dvd version of the 40-year-old virgin, though, there's this scene where cal and paula discuss whom they would and wouldn't fuck, outlandish contenders like barbara walters, and cal says something like, "she's so unappealing that i actually kind of want to fuck her. that's how sick i am." and i think this is that, it's contrasts; i was angry at marcus earlier this week, and now i'm happy with him, and furthermore wildly attracted to him, and so, even though i've just shed my last opportunity to conceive children this month, i want, desperately, to make some purposeful love to him. weird.

when i was writing for him, the summer between freshman and sophomore years, i still wasn't sure where we stood, he and i; didn't know i was attracted to him, couldn't imagine what a job he'd do on my emotions throughout the coming years. and so, when i extrapolated our ten-year college reunion, i gave us separate lives, separate hometowns, separate families. my husband was a bum, a superintellectual social retard who'd philandered his way out of my life, before the scope of the story, leaving me with a little boy and a broken heart. marcus's wife was comically perfect, exquisite and sweet and pregnant in this really saccharine way. i loaded it on like melodrama was going to go out of style. jared, a hypercritical beta reader, commented that it was "a little rich," even for me.

mia (that was her name) did everything exactly right, exactly the way i like to think i'd do it. she had some permutation of my every exact thought and she worshipped marcus, gestated his baby like it was the messiah. we read the story out loud, over the span of a few weeks (still one of my favorite memories of us: stretched out on the bench in front of king chapel with his head in my lap, treating my words like they'd been set out by some oracle), and it was what helped him get it, and afterward, flipping through it, he said, "wow, you..." and looked at me, and i shrugged and nodded, and he's understood, ever since.

we haven't talked about that in a long time, except in general terms. we talk about the story but never about mia, because it's awkward; i wrote them sex, never thinking that just loving him a lot would turn into anything else. but god, to be mia right now. i don't want to quit school or struggle to make ends meet or ruin his plans for the future. nothing so serious as all that. but there has to be some poignant, possibly physical way to actualize this connection i feel again. i hear his voice and i want to put it in a jar.

maybe i should make a collage tonight.

in other news (and good news it is), my roommate is clinically manic-depressive and on about a thousand medications for that and just about everything else. allergies, depression, stuff with her ovaries. we're still at the stage where every conversation is a getting-to-know-you exercise (have i said that before? i seem to remember those hyphens), where every sentence begins with "the thing about me is," and today i was telling her how i don't smoke or drink or even really take much medication because i like to have total control over my body chemistry, and she got quiet for a second and then launched into about a thirty-minute description of all seven thousand things she takes pills for.

i am not intimidated, not by that, but she has also mentioned that she had explosive breakups with both of her former roommates, fights that could not be resolved until someone moved out, and i am sort of hoping it's not just a matter of time before that happens here, too. i'm not the confrontational type, of course; i'm the roommate who would suffer silently through the entire semester before i'd ask her to close the window or move her ahem washcloth, and so i can't imagine how it would be a problem, really, but still. damn if she won't be the most challenging of four roommates (and counting).

but still better, in certain ways, than a certain other, who once complained for two days about something that sounded totally ridiculous, and then laid a used condom as one would an egg. un-savory. and so. i kind of feel like this is building my character, as calvin's dad would say, cohabitating with all these folks. like maybe after college, i will never meet anyone i can't deal with, somehow.