The hour badly spent

Right before Grey Lady, friend of this blog, left Facebook earlier this week, she poked me one last farewell.

See how it just hangs there all half-done, no "poke back" option? It’s the three-legged puppy of Facebook pokes. And much like a dog needing extra love, I will cherish it forever and never click remove, partly because I’ve got such a big heart, but mostly because my intertubes haven’t been working so well lately and I can’t get online much, so why waste valuable bandwidth on that? I know: I’m a terrible Facebook friend! And a bad blogger! And an awful person! But here’s the kicker:

She left a message on my wall, but since she termed her account, the comment’s gone and I’ll never know what it is. Ahem, was. It would be irresponsible of me to speculate as to its content. Nevertheless, I’m going to assume it was pithy, clever, and saucy, and probably makes me look bad — which is not difficult, so I guess it’s for the best that no one can read it.

The last time we met: one day before I left for Los Angeles. A spring afternoon, in her car. I reached over to hug her bye.

"Don’t try to cop a feel."

I wasn’t. Really. But I probably should have.

This may have been the last time we would ever see each other, and really this was all we had to say to each other?

Really?

When I first met her, it seemed as though I could tell her anything. Anything.

Months later, showing her my favorite movie, she buried her face under a blanket and started crying and we could barely talk about it.

After that, we only spoke to each other in this flat, burnt-out tone. Around her, conversation was weird, alien, like we were really only just gesturing to each other in a dark room. She told me I was always trying to figure her out. And she was right. I just wanted to reach her. Why was it so difficult?

One morning I woke up in her bed. Fully clothed.

I had drunk A LOT the night before and my head felt like someone parked an Oldsmobile inside it.

Right then, I had to go. I hadn’t meant to pass out there in the first place. I needed some water and I needed it to taste like aspirin and I needed to go, and I needed all this very badly. But her hair was also right there in my face. Smelling not like chemicals or cleanliness but like her, fresh and sweet. I couldn’t move. Not yet. Even though I had to go, even though I knew that everything would be spoiled when she woke up, and I knw that this was the best it would ever get, and for the rest of the day I would both just go back to being in pain all the time and talking to her like.

It struck me, that morning, that this feeling of unnamed, dreary, half-hidden pain, illuminated this morning by sunlight and hangover, is actually always there. That it might in fact be the reason this thing between me and her, whatever it is, always feels so difficult.

And if I was ever going to cop a feel, that would have been the moment.