The Appendix of the Heart

You know what is a very nice thing?

I will tell you.

A very nice thing is to have emailed the person with whom you are currently involved in intermittent, but very fun, pants removal, and to have told them that your visit with your family was stressful and it was very difficult to leave your grandmother not knowing if you would see her again, and then to open up your door and find a bouquet of lilacs on the step.

I think these will be a very lovely addition to the Marathon Date.

Smokin Hot Mae and I have had one of the oddest starts to dating I think I've had. I asked her out for a coffee, which turned into a beer, which turned into two, which turned into a tipsy walk home through the snow. So I asked her on a date date. The soonest we could schedule it was two weeks after. It was a smashing good time, so we decided we'd like another. In 10 days. It ended in a torn skirt and was very much fun. We decided we should do that again, though perhaps leaving out the ripped seams. We only went 7 days, that time.

This weekend, we're going to make up for it. Our next date, 10 days after our last date, goes from 6:30 pm on Saturday to sometime in the evening on Sunday.

We're making up for lost time, seems like.

I can't quite say how I feel about these gaps. I find them frustrating, for sure. That's a lot of time in between the kisses of someone whose kisses you quite thoroughly enjoy. And email, I do love email, to which anyone who has any kind of a relationship with me can attest, but, well, it's just not as easy to get to know someone that way as it is in person.

But I am enjoying that I want to see her again, and that the longer the gap, the more frustrated I become. It'll simmer down for a while, but I'll get an email, or see a picture and think, fuck, how many days?

It's all I can handle, as well. I can feel my heart struggling to come back alive, a thick ka-chunk as a bout of adrenaline shoots through its twisted veins and arteries and it lands hard in the bottom of my ribcage. The slow stretch and snap of a romantic feeling winding through.

That sounds dour and hopeless, but I don't mean it that way. I find it encouraging. I'm surprised I even have these jolts of actual feeling for someone else.

Whatever organ let me believe in Fate and True Love and The One is dead, starved of oxygen at a key point, perhaps. Maybe it'll grow back. Maybe it won't.

I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Because if what I get out of it is a day of backgammon and the newspaper in bed with a hot girl who is solid and thoughtful, funny, smart, creative, community-minded, warm through her core and a fucking great kisser, the kind of girl who will leave lilacs on my doorstep and offer me tea and hugs at just the right time, then I think that organ may have been vestigial.