I ran a lot, and stuck to a program--I felt taller and very proud, all my smiles were genuine.
Then I drank a lot, and the program fell to the curb and lay there with a broken spine.
I waited for a phone call from someone I'm not even crazy about, because I'm conditioned to wait. And maybe because I'm not done acting out disappointment in relationship, or because I'm not quite done not knowing that I am the one with all the magic.
In the end, I got a text. And I took it. Then I got a couple dozen more, and I took those too.
Meanwhile, the program continued to lie there in the curb as it rained without stopping for five solid days, and the program glared at me and said, please, please, put down the bottle and pick me up. So I poured some vodka into its mouth and the program was soothed back into silence.
In the interim, I started learning to play the guitar. I fell in love with it, got blisters on my fingers, and thought the guitar would be my new husband.
But the weather turned cold, and the guitar proved a chilly and unyielding bedfellow.
I called my ex, and he came. Then I called him again, and this time he came with chocolate. The speed and consistency of his coming, and his tendency to bring snacks, measured up stunningly against the shallow, half-hearted, and slow-in-coming responses of the Text-er (who recently took two entire days to shoot me a Facebook email regarding a clearly time-sensitive request I had made in a needy moment), and I began to wonder what was the point in keeping one's options open?
I mean, if one's options consist of a handful of perpetually hung-over hipsters with overly-cultivated facial hair and an inability to engage in actual voice-to-voice telephone contact, anyway? Right?
No point at all.
Then my ex came over one too many days in a week and I caught him unawares, face down on the bed in a classic self-deprecation spiral, moaning about the nameless ennui that had suddenly over-taken his limbs, and made it impossible for him to make a decision or even, in fact, to move at all. And I remembered what had out-weighed the chocolate, the cuddling, and the promptness of phone-call returning in the first place.
(Sigh.)
So I picked up the program. I held it in my arms and begged it to come back. I donned my sweats and pulled up my hair and went for a wheezing run. I promised my guitar I'd be back to make out later, and I will.
