Category: Bee

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The Monday before I met her in person

I was going to school again. On yet another monochromatic grad school day, I parked my car in the newly discovered second floor of the Circus Circus parking lot. The Circus Circus is this dingy casino in the northern most part of downtown Reno; walking distance from the University of Reno, Nevada. The parking lot was always full of cigarette butts and homeless residue (cigarette butts, old sweaters…) around the stars and the entry ways, but it was better to park there than pay 200 dollars to walk the same distance from the opposite direction.

The casino itself was constantly filled with old retirees that had long settled and decided to waste what was left of the life savings at the tables. It was displeasing, but not enough for college kids, such as myself, to float 20 dollars every now and then for the free drinks, and the occasional stuffed animal when you get a blackjack. Seemed weird to give a stuffed animal to people at a casino, but I suppose it’s better than the alternative: a voucher for their buffet. Fuck that buffet.

You know when you’re close to arriving somewhere and the radio finally decides to play a song that you like (yeah, I know, a 23 year old listening to the radio in 2018) so you decide to stay a little longer afterwards to listen to it? For Alice 96.5 at this particular time, it was Queen’s Somebody to Love. How apropos.

As I was slow-head-banging to the repetitive “somebody” chorus near the middle of the song, someone parked to my left. Glancing, it seemed like a normal car, just some Nissan Leaf. It had this plush Kirby hanging from the rear view window. Inside was the most beautiful person I have, and will have ever, seen.

B was scrambling to get ready for school and was collecting her things. She seemed to be on autopilot as she parked her car and picked up her purse with her ambitiously decorated key chain; it had one of those brightly colored, springy wires you used to see on old telephones on it. These undulating black swoops of dense hair framed these gentle eyes. They seemed dark brown at first, but I would later learn that they had this beautifully warm hint of honey when she looked up in the sky and had the sun hit her eyes just right.

I immediately pretended to look at my phone while I tried to wait until she left and strained my head to look straight instead of to the side. I felt flustered trying not to clench my jaw after I had overcompensated in closing it after it had dropped. Wait, she didn’t see me look down too quickly, right? Should I try looking down again but slower? But wait, I’d have to look at her again, right? Wouldn’t that make it look lik–

She left.

I waited for her to at least reach the stairs of the floor before I even tried to make my way out of the car. I didn’t want her to see my dorky violin that I had to lug out of the backseat of my car. I didn’t want her moment of sonder towards a stranger to include something that embarrassing just yet. I was in the school orchestra, and I had no reliable place to leave my violin where I could keep it on campus. Also, I was late for parallel programming. So I went on my way.

When I had gotten back to my car at the end of the day after a long day of trying to worry about what I was going to write into my thesis (which was supposed to be at the end of the semester), her Leaf was still there. Grad school was sluggish, but the most exciting part of my life thus far, see; I had nothing else going on that I could actively try to keep alive in my life.

I mean, I guess I was already trying to write music back then too, or dabble in my 3D modeling/shading, but everything had taken a back burner to my life up until then. The craziest thing I did regularly, something that not even my Mexican (and thus helicopter) parents knew about, edibles. Marijuana was legal in Nevada now, and I had figured out that I could go and restock between classes and keep it in my desk in my grad lab. No one used, let alone checked, the lackluster drawers from the equally drab and gray cubicles. Every now and then, I would take an edible on my way home, such that the effects wouldn’t kick in until I reached home. It was roughly a 20 min walk from my lab to the car and another 20 min drive home, so the timing almost always worked out.

This day was no different. I swear I don’t think I could feel the effects of the edible by the time I had gotten back to my car, but my word isn’t reliable on a couple of accounts. I have a notoriously bad memory, as well as a low tolerance to weed, so it’s possible the benign effects of being more open were starting to take hold before I could perceive it. I swear I wish I could say I hadn’t taken anything. It would make what I did more significant.

Notecard with handwritten note. It reads, "The person that parked to your right through you were very cute and thought to give you his number. He thought Why the hell not?" There is also a redacted phone number on the notecard
I left her a note on her windshield.

I couldn’t find anything better than an old parking permit that I had from when I had to go to the med school for my senior project just a year prior. That’s why you see the wrong date in reverse from the other side. I left my number there on that white space.

I wasn’t expecting a text back or anything. I had had some conversations on Tinder that never amounted to anything and my in-person flirting skills made me sound either too desperate to align with people or too blasé to be taken seriously, so I didn’t think this would go anywhere. I was too nervous to ever approach such a stunning person like this, so a note would be the next best thing. But wouldn’t that be a cop-out? The worst that could happen is she has a boyfriend, and lets me know, or doesn’t even tell me back anything.

B didn’t text me until the next day either, so that night I went to bed that night thinking, “Meh, maybe next time.” Apparently, she had driven home and didn’t discover the brightly green colored note until the next day and decided to jump start the conversation until then.

I was elated it worked. She said it was an incredibly cute thing. I was so hoping she would think so. A little back and forth gave me an impression of someone that seemed high maintenance at first, if I’m being totally honest. She said she was very picky about her food, and that ended out being very true and, quite possibly, the only negative attribute I can think of of my very first would-be-girlfriend.

Overall, however, we hit it off nicely. I felt like even if the conversation ended up sour, I wouldn’t want to end it with that soulless “DTF?” texts you send to wasted Tinder matches. I could genuinely feel like I could meet and befriend this person. I felt like I could actually see myself talking to a person out loud instead of typing on a screen; something I had only ever felt with one other person beforehand. I also didn’t do that one thing flakey guys like myself always did which was to ghost out of disinterest; we kept the same conversation going for a few days. It was one long conversation that was interrupted by sleep and school instead of the little spurts of conversation one tends to have that are usually sparked by the cliché “Sorry I just saw this.”

We agreed to go to a local Chinese diner in downtown on that Friday for lunch; that was on the Friday before spring break, 2018.

I go back home today later…

It’s 1:37 am. and I’m not done packing for a flight that leaves at 1 PM. I figure I should get a blog post out, right?

Fuck. That didn’t happen. It’s now a few days later, Christmas Eve 2019. Plenty within my family has happened during that time that I decided I’m not yet comfortable sharing. The relationship between me and my sister unrealistically soured. I’m still uneasy about it, so I’ll share later

Not because it’s personal, by the way; the whole point of having an anonymous blog is to be specific but nameless. The specificity is what is very important here: it’d be nice of people that I knew to eventually read this blog, but not be reminded of me just yet. I’ve learned people tend to have more empathy towards my stories if they don’t know I’m the protagonist. I’ve had this tendency to be blended into the background of people’s lives, like an extra in a movie, after they get to know me. For some people, however, it feels like that fade-out is more of an active choice than a passive one.

There’s a word for that type of realization, by the way: Sonder. Leave it to the Germans (or the Dutch I think?) for pinpointing a specific piece of humanity we have all experienced but never named.

Sonder – (neologism) The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it. 

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sonder

Anyways, the real reason I’d like to take this opportunity is to talk about my next few blog “category“. It’s about my most recent and most painful relationship with this girl from my hometown I will refer to only as B. Like every other post, I will limit everything to their letter, lest the people they represent read these and understand who they are right away.

I will be going into some specifics for a few reason. I have this… nagging feeling that something is going to happen after I lay everything out on the table. I’m not talking about a book deal, or a movie, or that my ex will come running back into my arms, or anything else that I’d obviously yearn for. But I feel this fear about keeping my stories to myself.

I want to tell you that I want people to read this story to help them out. Y’know, the whole “learn from the mistakes of others” thing you read from the old-school, black framed picture of a polar bear you always stared at in class instead of the whiteboard. That’d be a nice reason to do this. I hope it happens too.

I think that that fear, however, comes from seeing my own grandma slowly slip into a poorer and poorer memory. She hasn’t been formally diagnosed with dementia or anything else, although there’s a good chance that might be a physician’s first guess. I want to get this painful memory out before the memories start to get fuzzier around the edges. I had fallen in love before and I keep the few memories of P (the girl I had been with briefly 5 years prior that I was still hung up on) around there in my mind; replying like old TV time-fillers. I go back to them when I’m stressed, or in need of comfort. They center me. But only I know of them. I’ll share those at some point as well. But I feel like B needs to hear those stories before the internet does. I’m sorry, reader. She asked first.

I’m pretty sure though, as biased as one’s own self-reflection often is, that the real reason I want to share is this sense of validation. I know there were things that I did that were wrong. I know there were things I should’ve done. I want to say that there were also things that she did that were wrong. But I’m not quite sure about that. I feel as though my friends that have told me that what she had done is wrong, don’t have the full story. I don’t want to make the same mistakes again. The pain hurt more than I can describe in words. This is my trying to make sure I get the full story out there. So I can at least get close to describing it. I want everyone to know.

P, if you’re reading this, please continue to do so. I’d love your input on this.

B, if you’re reading this… please… um, uhh…, keep reading. Please don’t give me your input, unless of course it’s absolutely necessary to set the record straight or because you don’t want me to share something; I will respect that. Please only let me know that you read it. It’s not that I don’t want your input. I just… honestly wouldn’t know how I’d react to it within the parameter I can. But only do so when I finish.

Also B, if you’re reading this, I still love you.