you can act real rude and totally removed and I can act like an imbecile..

Our conversation.. about condoms.

"I mean, you know what I'm talking about, right? The whole thing becomes very self aware.. you lose enthusiasm.. you know."

"Well it's like trying to open a childproof container in the middle of a candle lit dinner!"

"So gets some packets of ramen and practice!!"

Mutual crack-up.

.. we get along.

And it occurs to me, this weekend, when I cannot speak to him, just how miserable I would be if I was still alone. 'Alone' as in without romance. Without one person who openly thinks of me as I think of him. He is so sweet, and I am so lucky.

Memory:

I wake up in the night, an unplanned interlude, and he is awake too. "I really, really love you." he says, groggy. I wrap his arm tighter around me, pressing my back into his front and say quietly that I love him, too.

Come with me to the book store for a second- let me show you what happened:

I have these plans, you see, to buy a book for someone who just doesn't like the books that I like. I'm pretty dumb sometimes.

So I go to the store and look in the V section because that's where this book lives. Below the book is a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I'd watched the movie version of this on a whim, because Netflix said I would like it based on my enjoyment of a small film called Good Dick. Good Dick is a great flick, by the way. Really cute.

So here we have shelf one, V section, with BIWHM directly underneath book in V section I am looking for. My sister, a week or so ago started talking to me about Biwhm which I had watched not two nights prior-- this is notable because we are not usually on the same wave length. IN Biwhm is a pretty intense reference to Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl which is exactly where I open the book to when I pick it up. I flip the book once again and get to the exact conversation she (sister) and I talked about during our fleeting conversation.

I amble around the place and drool over a few things, The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin as well as his book about art which I can't remember the name of, a few books by Haruki Murakami. I am now in the M section.

I mosey some more, having moved now to the lower portion of the book store where all bets are off and nothing is alphabetized. I pick up What I Talk About When I Talk About Runningwhich is also by Murakami, though I am no longer in the M section, and read the first few pages.

I desire this book.

I put it down and directly to my right is a stack of Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl.

I stare for a moment. People walk by me. The world slows down.

I walk by a book whose title I can't remember and flip directly to a chapter break. Right there in bold it says "This Is True." I close the book and open it back, believing I saw something familiar in the first few lines of the new chapter, looking for that page I'd lost. "This Is True" yells out at me from the exact page I had flipped to initially.

On the other side of the first floor I find myself before another stack of Murakami books, one called After the Quake which I really enjoyed. I love it for this reason, and I will quote it below-- there is a conversation in it about polar bears.

Here:

"He once told me about polar bears - what solitary animals they are. They mate just once a year. One time in a whole year. There is no such thing as a lasting male-female bond in their world. One male polar bear and one female polar bear meet by sheer chance somewhere in the frozen vastness, and they mate. It doesn't take long. And once they are finished, the male runs away from the female as if he is frightened to death: he runs from the place where they have mated. He never looks back - literally. The rest of the year he lives in deep solitude. Mutual communications - the touching of two hearts - do not exist for them. So, that is the story of polar bears - or at least it is what my employer told me about them.'

'How very strange.'

Yes, it is strange. I remember asking my employer, ' Then what do polar bears exist for?' ' Yes, exactly,' he said with a big smile. 'Then what do we exist for?"

Anyway.

There is another story in there called Super-Frog Saves

Tokyo, which was the story I was perusing before I set the book down to see, again to my direct right, a stack of the book that I had initially come here to purchase which was also sitting, one floor up, in the V section.

I am now at home.

I have decided to re-teach myself how to walk on my hands.