my medicine

There are a few very select people that I can remember the precise moment I met them as if it happened yesterday. I can instantaneously go back to that moment and relive it just as realistically as if it were the first time.

Meagan is one of these few people and I’m infinitely grateful for the day she plopped down next to me on a bus. Disheveled and out of breath, she had an enormous sense of relief spread across her face as she found the only available seat, which happened to be next to me. Rather than the awkward shift away from one another and avoidance of eye contact, she immediately dove into conversation about her latest boy troubles and I felt inclined to verbal vomit into my own. Little did I realize she would change my life completely from that moment on.

The day I knew that in Meagan resided the most genuine friendship of my life was also on a day when I wasn’t quite sure I had it in me to face another day. At 17 the most shattering moment of my inexperienced life was the day I was dumped in pursuit by my then boyfriend to “experience other people.” Nothing could have been more crushing and my bed was the only place I could find solace. I was determined to never leave the comfort of my twin bed I had slept in since I was 3 years old and I wasn’t about to change my mind even if it meant living out my remaining days on my floral sheets in complete isolation.

It was that day when Meagan appeared in my room, dead-set on not taking no for an answer. Before I could even go down my poorly formed list of excuses, she forced me out of bed and into clothes. Before I knew it, we were in my step-father’s Jeep Cherokee littered with miscellaneous trash and probably even a few bottles of liquor. Although it was early spring and the weather was still closer to winter than summer, we began an aimless drive. Annoyed and wishing I was still in bed, we set course for no where with the windows down and the heat full force. I hopped on the I-90 toward downtown in the middle of the afternoon and she excitedly popped in a mixed tape made just for the occasion. I fought the urge to car-dance for a song or two but we both knew that given the right combination of 90’s music, I would eventually cave and dance my upper-body as if my torso and arms had never moved before. That day I realized that a boy was no reason to feel destroyed… that life would in fact go on, and there’s no better remedy than a best friend and the greatest hits of the 90’s to cure anything life can throw at you.

To this day that combination has been my medicine to just about everything.

sorry

We were standing on your porch huddled in the cold.
I said it felt like Buffalo.
You assumed I meant that I was home.
I chose to let you.

feelers

"Feelers" is a term my best friend from high school came up with to describe that feeling you get about someone where your stomach drops just thinking about them. I've only had feelers once before and wasn't sure it would happen again.

Lately, my otherwise natural smoothness has been compromised and what's resulted is a horribly awkward, and sweaty-palmed version of myself. My first attempt at saying "hi" resulted in some strange high-pitched noise escaping my throat. I played it off as a cough and immediately fled the elevator.

the mouth breather

I never thought I’d find myself in a dating situation with someone embodying the very trait that irks me to such severity, I find myself repulsed.

Mouth breathing is a habit that forces me to shudder at my very core. There’s nothing more that I would like to do than to confront every slack-jawed individual I come across, and slap some sense into them. Or at the very least slap their mucus-laden sinuses free so they’ll engage in intra-nostril oxygen exchange. When I see a mouth breather, I can’t help but become fixated on their mouth, watching each inhale and exhale, envisioning the massive number of microscopic germs reproducing and festering like a cesspool. I study the white crust that has formed at the corners of their mouth and wonder how long they can stand to have it form there, all the while secretly wanting to take one of those tools masons use when building a brick wall to firmly scrape and remove the cement that has encrusted their mouth.

Given my preexisting discrimination against mouth-breathers, it would be a no-brainer to assume I would never date one and I never had any intention of proving that assumption wrong. I began dating a guy who by all other accounts has his act together (at least in terms of most 20-something year olds), but the one trait that I just cannot look beyond is his mouth-breathing. At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt; he was just getting over a cold and I thought, “well maybe this is just the residual stuffy-nose.” I figured eventually, it would wear off and he would resume breathing normally. As the weeks have progressed, there is little sign that his mouth-breathing is just a temporary phenomenon. Instead, I catch myself staring at his mouth, examining each breath, almost as if I can see them like in a cartoon where the smelly kid is radiating stink lines. Each breath becomes like one of those silent elevator farts that everyone who is trapped in the confined space seems to notice, but no one is about to call anyone out on it. Instead, everyone holds their breath and braces for the doors to open.