From the MBTA to Driving All Day, Part 2

If you ask 100 women, if they’re offered the chance to complain about the guy they’re pining for, even via email, even to someone they barely know, even if that person is another guy, 100 women will say hell, yeah. Can I get a witness?

So with an enthusiasm that I’m sure was the epitome of sexy appeal, I vented. To a marked degree. And then five minutes later, feeling silly about my venting, I took a chance that his email address was the same as his instant messaging handle. I messaged him. He wrote back. From thereafter, we were buddies.

I only know this because I went back and looked. I read emails and group posts and pieced things together. Only one concept is crystal-clear to me now, and that is that I don’t remember anything. I have to read to remember how I felt. Some emails I have no recollection—none whatsoever—of conceiving, let alone composing. Sure I can extrapolate from the facts I can assemble, but I can’t swear it’s reality. I can’t be Pioneer Woman, reconstructing conversations and feelings and innuendoes when the real truth exists somewhere between 12-point Arial font and buzzing phone lines between Massachusetts and Kansas.

We instant messaged for hours. We chatted about music and men and women. I told him “One Week” by the Barenaked Ladies described my ideal relationship. He confessed his love for Cowboy Junkies. I bruised my foot sliding into third in a softball game and he typed me through an Epsom-salt soak. We talked about homosexuality and domestic violence and addiction. I challenged him and he laughed at my toughness.

But we did not flirt. That was my rule. No flirting.

I had done the Internet dating thing. I’d done it hardcore for three months. I met men I never wanted to see again, men I wanted to be friends with, men I wanted to walk around Harvard Square with and kiss in the T station, and, once, a man I liked a lot. Until I discovered he was insane. And probably gay. But we made a nice ride of it for a few weeks.

A hundred personal ad responses, three months, and nothing to show for it but a narrow escape from a closeted, Prozac-popping compulsive liar and an appreciation for Hope Davis’s character in Next Stop, Wonderland. So I was done. I wasn’t against online dating as a general rule, but I, personally, was finito . By the time you find yourself staring over a beer glass at someone, I’d realized, you’re at ground zero no matter how many words you’d exchanged or phone conversations you’d had. Writing ability--which naturally I’d judged each potential suitor on, and harshly—-wasn’t a good barometer for compatibility. I figured I may as well start out knowing whether they had love handles.

But we were friends. As the days passed, we revealed more of ourselves to each other. He lived in Kansas, not Oklahoma as I'd somehow assumed. And he was single, in fact, not attached to the woman in his email address. I’ve alluded to that story before, and for the most part it’s not mine to tell. But three things I’ll share: he was married to her, she passed away, and she was terminally ill when he met her.

That told me all I needed to know about him as a person.

tbc