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.

dinner with the ex

I’m not sure when the last time it was when we saw each other, probably on a corner downtown sharing a cigarette in the snow. In reality only two months had gone by since then, but it easily could have been something more like a year.

I can't explain what made me agree to dinner… maybe to validate the decision I had made, but more realistically it was probably to quietly pass judgment. I couldn’t wait to hear how miserable he was now that I was gone, how his penis hadn’t seen any action in months, how he was close to losing his job, how his hair is now receding… anything that would result in my clear superiority.

So we arrived at a small Persian restaurant I had never been to. Immediately the waiter insured awkwardness by seating us at the obvious romantic-date table next to the fireplace. Thanks to the safety buzz I was carrying from the two glasses of wine I drank before leaving for dinner, the typical catch-up conversation was almost familiar.

The waiter continued to contribute to the date ambiance with complimentary dessert for us to share with two spoons. Sliding the check on the table, he coyly gave a rose to the lady and the check to the gentleman. I gladly let him pay, after all I figured it was the least he could do.

This same time last year, we would have been at my mother’s house in Buffalo, half-stoned/half-drunk navigating through my mother’s affair with a married man, my older sister’s verbal outbursts, and my little sister’s shift toward all things that scream teenage angst.

But now we were sitting across from each other on what should have been an evening reserved for some happy couple on their first or second date, anxiously engaging in hand-sex. Seeing him now I realized how skinny he is or maybe he always had been. I immediately hated the new watch he was wearing. It was a throw back to something you’d find in a cereal box in 1984 that doubled as a calculator, but to me it was a clear indication of an attempt to overly portray the indie-rocker image he had always been struggling to achieve.

We survived the evening seemingly unscathed until just minutes before we were set to leave, he decided to abruptly announce, “So I’ve been on a few dates myself lately.” While I was aware this topic was lurking just under the surface of our meeting, I wasn’t expecting to actually go there. While I had already started dating someone new, I wasn’t about to bring it up and I definitely didn’t want to hear about his latest makeout buddies. But I won't lie... I smiled a little on the inside when I learned she was a bartender at the townie bar with a bachelor’s degree in peace and conflict studies.