I’m Amanda. I’ve got wide eyes, a smart mouth, and a MetroCard. And I’m not afraid to use them.
Next Thursday, I have yet another hunk of writing due for my fiction workshop. I don’t know what I was thinking when I signed up to turn in so much writing two weeks after the last batch.
I know! Probably that I’d be able to get Junot Diaz to ghostwrite.
In exactly two days, I’m going to freak out and be unable to consume any media - it’ll be all about pooping it out. So I’m trying to get some reading in tonight. The following dialogue from Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge grabbed me.
I regale my co-worker friend Clark with my more interesting dating stories. And believe me, they’ve been interesting. Alas, I can’t blog most of them.
So I just tell friends offline, including Clark. It’s nice to get a guy’s - especially a normal guy’s - opinion.
This last week has been busy. Lemme sum it up all easy-like.
Last night I had dinner with this guy whom I’m convinced is lying to me about his height. He says he’s six feet tall, but I think he’s adding in at least an inch of imagination.
I tell him this over dinner right after I ask about his medical maladies.
“We’re going to settle this,” I say.
I recently went on one of the most bizarre dates of my life. It was at a lively restaurant where my date and I had some trouble hearing each other.
Him: You keep licking your lips.
Me: Really?
Him: Yeah.
I realized I loved TBID one day when I went to get my hair colored. This was long ago.
The colorist had painstakingly turned my head into a paint by number, leaving the various dyes on for 15 minutes and then calling me to the sink.
I lay back as she washed my hair. Warm water rushed through the strands. Her nails gently scraped my scalp.
It was the most I’d been touched by someone else in days.
We talk of love like it’s some cosmic destination or black hole. We can fall into or out of it. We can live inside it. It permanently alters our universe.
The endeavor’s only a few spacesuits and freeze-dried sandwiches short of NASA.
I recently read a “Modern Love” column from The New York Times that addressed a question dear to my scarred heart: What do you do when someone falls out of love with you?
I broke up with Cade, the boyfriend before TBID, because he said he didn’t love me anymore. He’d been saying it for months, and I considered it slowly and thoughtfully, like I would a hard candy. You can have a great time with someone who doesn’t technically love you. Not that we really did, but you can.
Since then, I’ve never seen him. We don’t live all that far away. We even work near each other. But coincidence hasn’t reunited us yet, and maybe it never will. That’s something I can live with.
Forget that some people may celebrate August 1 as National Girlfriend Day. It’s finally a month that’s not July, and I’ll take it. In fact, I’ll take eleven.
July was one of the longest months of my life maybe. I’ve never felt more like a crazy person, feeling normal sometimes and then realizing, “Oh, wait. The shape I thought my life had has been completely altered.”
I thought TBID and I loved each other. I thought maybe we had a future.
But we had Play-Doh.
