An epic of epic epicness.

Warning: Tale of anger, depression, and stupid boys coming up. If you've heard it a million times before (you have), I would look elsewhere for original entertainment.

Thursday night: we went to see Scott Pilgrim Versus the World. I have class in the j-school until 6:30pm, after which I hike to the student union to inhale dinner before the 7pm student DJ meeting. After that I trot downstairs and found Mike and Suitemate just finishing their own dinner, so I join them. We laugh a lot, mostly at each other. He's easy to embarrass; I'm prone to absurdity. Both of those make us crack up. Suitemate looks mystified a lot of the time, but that's sort of her default setting (She's smart, I swear she is--she's a biomedical engineer, for fuck's sake, but she acts so goddamn oblivious).

At the movie: Suitemate, Mike, me, then an empty seat at the end of our row for Bluetooth who said he was coming after a mandatory jazz concert attendance. Scott Pilgrim starts, and it's awesome--I love the music and how it's illustrated and how the video game touches give the story a sense of epicness that new, complicated romances always feel like when they're happening to you. Michael Cera is still Michael Cera, but it works here.
Bluetooth sneaks in and sits down in the dark a few minutes after the opening credits. I smile at being in the middle of an adorable Comp Sci geek sandwich.

Lights up: we wander out, I lose my glasses in the theater, Bluetooth found them, we all talk about our vision problems, we talk more, I wonder if Bluetooth is slightly racist, but he likes The Boondocks. I love that show. I show him the voice mail icon on my phone and tell him that's him but I still can't get to it; he says, "...I never left you a voice mail. Sorry."
Inside, I wither into a fetal-position-shaped crumbly ball of shame.
We group-walk Mike back to his car, which is named Minerva. I've had the letter I wrote shoved into my pocket this whole time; I give it to him and tell him it's writing crap to read at home.
Bluetooth walks me and Suitemate back to dorm; I give him the downstairs non-signed-in tour, Suitemate goes upstairs, I'm still wired so I walk him to the car in front of the Earth Wind and Fire building (not the actual name, but close enough that everyone calls it that). He asks what I'm doing this weekend. My answer spazzes out. I attempt to apologize and say I don't know, which is not a perfect effort but he says okay, he'll get in touch and maybe we could do something Friday night. I don't know what I want to do. I don't know if I want to do something with him. I just--don't--know and my brain freezes and I smile at him and refuse his offer for a ride back (it's two and a half blocks of a street I know like the back pattern of BF's freckles and oh that's an unfortunate thought to have) and he hugs me, for a long time, until the glasses I've parked on top of my head start to bend and I have to untangle them and we break apart. He calls my phone to leave a voice mail so I can check my voice mail and finally get that fucking thing off my mind; it works.

A few things: his fly was unzipped. The fly on his really old jeans that was topped with a dust-speckled Honors College polo (oh Brother), all wrapped up in an old Northface puffy jacket that was leaking stuffing from one shoulder and VELCRO shoes. And he had his cellphone--his goddamn smartphone--clipped to his belt. When did it become fashionable to make your belt look like a python whose last meal isn't quite done yet?
I like geeks and geek style, but they need to realize that cell phones are becoming smaller for the sole purpose of being easier to store in pockets.

Friday: As I'm walking to my first class, I get into a text message conversation with Mike. He's read my letter. Can we talk/write? Yes, let's phone talk after our morning classes. Countdown to 12:15pm begins.
"I'm okay. How're you?"
"Really nervous."
"Yeah. Me, too."
Upshot is, it's Jesus's fault.
Atheist me and Christian Mike have vastly different expectations and morals for a dating relationship, which works out great for a friendship that doesn't involve planning any sort of life together for any amount of time.
I knew this. It was what I was expecting. Not what I was hoping for, but what I was expecting. What I wasn't expecting was how lonely it would make me feel (a lot).
We're still friends. Campus best friends, as he put it, albeit with an extra two or three servings of awkward sauce that I'm not prepaired to face until after Thanksgiving.

I always fucking take it. Every fucking time I give a guy a note explaining my squishy feelings for them, it ends in "Um, wow. I didn't know you felt this way, and, uh, you're such a good friend that I hate to..." You'd think I'd learn my fucking lesson by now, right? No. Reckless Writing Dumbass triumphs over reason every. single. time and has since 7th grade. I'd like to think feelings have grown more sophisticated, skins thickened, but no.

So then I spend the rest of Friday waiting to see if Bluetooth will contact me in some way that I will receive and be able to respond to; he text messages me about 6:30pm and says there's not much going on and he's cleaning his room. What do I have planned. Nothing except dinner and TV, I say truthfully. Quiet evening in. Silence from him. Real exciting, I know, I joke. Silence for another hour, until I can't take it and ask if he would like to hang out or would cleaning take all night?
No, he said, cleaning won't take all night, but he has to write a management science paper. Sorry.

BULL. SHIT. I haven't dated in 3 years and even I know that NO ONE has to write a SCHOOL PAPER on a FRIDAY NIGHT. Fuck you. You owe me $5.98 for the pint of ice cream and diet Coke I thought really hard about getting that night and then decided to get for Saturday lunch, however much I can spend at the thrift store Saturday afternoon, and for however much it costs to produce The Soup, the Fashion Police, and the hour and a half of Avatar I made it through before deciding to drag my sorry weeping ass and broken ego upstairs to bed while remembering what BF's shoulder felt like and how nobody else in the entire universe has a shoulder that feels exactly like his.

And that's what's happend so far this weekend.

Letters I won't send.

To BF:
I'm sorry I called you again last night. It was just to let you know that I gave your camera to the front desk of your brother's workplace on Friday so they could give it to him Monday so he could give it to you...whenever the hell he said he would. Per the instructions in your letter you left for me at the front desk of my dorm.
Which annoyed the hell out of me, by the way. Is a Facebook message really so much more fucking trouble than manually writing something in pen when you type 90% of the time and had to actually travel further than the far edge of your futon to deliver the damn letter in person at a place that is still clogged with memories of, well everything? Was it really so fucking much easier to give a letter to a person so they had to flag me down instead of just hitting send your own damn self? We don't even have to be friends for you to send me a Facebook message. Embrace cyberdistance and leave my parasympathetic nervous system alone!
Ahem. You will note that everything's in there, and that I deliberately avoided Brother. I'll miss his snarkiness (I fondly recall snickering when his fake shanking turned into real sucker punches when you made a bad joke. Which was often.), his Lego catalog, and the victories of making him laugh. I won't miss feeling like I'm performing every time I talk to him.
You're a good guy, and I just want to make sure you understand immediately what I'm trying to say. I'm impatient. You know this. I want to be understood, not in an existential sense (although bonus points if that is managed), but in a clear communication sense. You know this. The way you talk around things drives me up the batshitting wall. YES or NO or I UNDERSTAND do wonders to my nerves at strategic times.
But I guess you don't really need to know that anymore, do you? No.
From:
Your ex-girlfriend who has been avoiding that label all week but needs to slap herself in the face with it until she gets use to it

Dear Mike,
I won't tell you how many times I've checked my cell phone for text messages even when I haven't heard the obnoxious unmistakable chime that doesn't mean anything else. It's embarrassing.
I won't tell you how your smell reminds me of my grandma's kitchen. You might take that as an insult (it's not; it just means you smell clean).
I won't tell you that you're the only live friend who's asked me how I'm doing. You might find that needy.
I will say thank you and DAMN IT, MAN, TELL ME I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO FELT THAT LAST THURSDAY and I'm going crazy trying to save you from being a rebound guy. You're too good for that. I like you too much for that.
I don't want to think about this anymore. Want to see a movie that will require all of our attention? It's free and really interesting.
--Your friend

Hey, Katie,
YES, I will come celebrate your birthday with you. Holy Zadie Smith YES. I want to learn how to party.
It should piss me off that you haven't responded at all when I told you about last Tuesday, but by now I really appreciate an excuse to have non-selfish, non-confusing fun.
And maybe you can demonstrate what tastes best with vodka.
Love,
Mel

Twitchy Freshman:
Just go away.