(First: One Through Six, Seven And Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve And Thirteen, Fourteen And Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen and Twenty.)
2003, aged twenty-one
I turn twenty-one at one of my favorite restaurants, surrounded by friends and family. I sip on a raspberry margarita before my friends whisk me off to local bars to down strong shots and mugs of sangria. Late in the night, I drunkenly attempt to play pool, and I knock a ball off the table and into the leg of a bar patron. This woman starts screeching at me that she's a dancer, and I could have ended her career just then, when she was standing in a BAR and someone acted DRUNK. HOW COULD THAT HAVE HAPPENED?! All I could think to stammer out to this annoying dancer was, "But it's my 21st birthday." As if maiming someone should be totally excused on such a day. (Note: I kind of think it should.)
I imagine now is as good a time as any to tell this next story (mom, avert your eyes), the story of my Valentine's date from 2003. I meet him at a bar the night of February 13. We hit it off, or at least that's what the cheap Long Island Iced teas tell me. He asks for my number and says, "Let's get together tomorrow night, forget that it's Valentine's and just have fun." I love this idea, even more so when he calls the next afternoon to make plans. I suggest watching a movie at his place, and that's what we do. I can't remember the movie, not all these years later, but I do remember—quite clearly—the moment he turns to me—as I sit on his living room couch—and asks, "So, do you want to take off your shirt now?" There is a moment I sit there in silence, and maybe he thinks I'm considering his question, but really I'm considering the possibility that he could be certifiably insane. I tell him I'm going to keep my shirt on, thanks for the suggestion and all, and then I yawn and look at the clock and, wow, is it getting late. He does walk me to my car, what a fucking gentleman, and there he continues to charm the hell out of me by saying, "I may call you, but I probably won't."
The rest of the school year marches on, and it's kind of a hard semester for me. I'm meeting really wrong-for-me men (obviously), and I'm making kind of horrible-for-me choices. There are many nights I feel lost, scattered, scared and, when I look back now, like a 21-year-old. I'm normal, I know now, but I sure as hell didn't know it then. I wish I could go back and tell that girl to calm down. It'll be fine, I want to say. Just breathe. It turns out fine anyway, thankfully.
Towards the beginning of summer, we throw an engagement party for Crystal, and we gather at El Chico for a margarita-filled afternoon of celebrating. Mike, my now-husband and my then-nothing, comes to the party, of course, because he's one of Crystal's closest friends. He comes with his then-girlfriend and my now-friend, and we sit at opposite sides of the table. I don't say more than hello to either of them, and it's not until less than a year later how odd I'll look back on that day to be. "You were just down the table," I'll say to him one day as we hold hands. "And all I could think about were my fajitas."
That summer I move into a duplex with Lauren where life calms down in a lot of ways and gets even crazier in others. She and I go grocery shopping and cook dinner together and although our friendship will go through the wringer the next semester, I have very good memories from living with her. I have great memories from that summer.
My senior year begins and with it a goal to go out as many nights as possible with Cherie. We have so much fun, at football games and on Northgate, and one night after a few too many apple martinis, we begin talking to a group of people with a cop standing nearby. One of the guys in the group says to Cherie, "You know, you're drunk enough that that cop could totally arrest you," and Cherie, without missing a beat, looks at the cop and smiles and says, "Do you want to arrest me?" It's what I love about Cherie, what everyone loves about Cherie, that she's fearless and fun and you could never hold anything against her for very long.
That December I organize an event for the seniors in my sorority. We wine taste at Messina Hof and then head back to Cherie's house for food and more wine and some of the best conversation I've ever had. Crystal happens to be in town this weekend, for her birthday, and later that night—after the wine and food and conversation—Cherie and I head to Northgate to see her, to help her celebrate turning 23. I am wearing a borrowed (and totally fantastic) black velvet blazer from Natalie—a blazer I will drunkenly lose later that night—and when Cherie and I walk into Madhatter's we see Crystal and a few of her friends already there. Yep, there's Mike, sitting on the couch with a beer in hand. He says to me as I walk up, "You look nice," and my heart skips a beat, which (holy shit) I was not expecting. Where did that reaction come from? I'm still not sure. I've told the story of this night a million times before—before on this site, even—and I don't know how to tell it any differently, except to say that I realize now a lot had to go into making that night come together, and in hindsight I know that at that point Mike and I had very few chances ahead of us (and like a million behind us) to be in the same room, on the same night. He was single, and I was in a better place than I'd been for much of the past year. I was laughing when I walked up, I remember that, and I don't know if he had ever really seen me laugh before. Something clicked that had never clicked before, that much both of us knew.
The next day we all went to lunch to say goodbye to Crystal, and Mike kept trying to make eye contact with me, but I was too nervous, too weird, and I couldn't bring myself to act like a normal human being around him. I couldn't leave fast enough, so I could actually take a breath, and I didn't hear from him for the rest of the year. I started dating someone else. When Natalie asks about Mike during the trip she and I took to California for Christmas, I tell her I just don't think we make much sense together, and I meant that. I thought, on paper, we were all wrong.
But when I drive around our small college town, I find myself looking for his car.