Gregg, Susan and I at graduation, May, 2000.

You are going to have trouble making friends. This is totally normal and means nothing about you personally. It only means that for your entire life, you’ve been surrounded by peers with similar interests, intellectual pursuits and IQs, and now you’ve got to sort through the guy who likes to talk about mulching his garden and the woman whose fascinated with different kinds of decorations to glue onto her eyelashes (and you didn’t even know you could glue things onto eyelashes), so have some patience.

Wear real pants. Not those stupid overalls, and not sweatpants. Real pants have zippers.

Everything everyone told you about how where you go to college determines your fate and your intelligence is false. It turns out the Ivy League kids aren’t any smarter than you, and the kids who started out at community college aren’t any dumber than you. You’ll have to get to know them to find out, which is a good thing. 

Big underpants are never a mistake.

You’re not imagining it: those people really are racist.

Exercise regularly and cut it out with the ice cream every night. Your body is no longer pickled in alcohol and caffeine and your metabolism slowing will make your Freshman Fifteen look achingly nostalgic and cute.

Don’t be so hard on yourself. Really. Don’t.

Clean the bathroom more often. Gross.

You’re not tweezing your eyebrows enough. Seriously, they’re not conjoined twins.

Read the books you want to read and the TV you want to watch and don’t feel guilty about it. That’s like feeling guilty for having a personality.

Gregg will be even more awesome than he is at 22, but it’s going to take a lot of time. Also, since you’re here, tell him to get rid of that dumb goatee and to stop accepting orange-flavored vodka from people as presents. You’re going to have to move several bottles of that stuff before dumping it because orange-flavored vodka? Really?

That thing you want to do but think you can never do it or make any money from it? Do it anyway.

Don’t be afraid of anything in the real world (besides snakes and spiders and frogs) (frogs are still scary to you, fyi). But don’t be afraid of technology or your superiors or standing up for yourself. Mistakes feel awful at the time, but in the future, you’ll see how important and life-changing they were.

You are smarter than you give yourself credit. You are also prettier than you give yourself credit, and when you look back at photos of yourself in fifteen years, you’re going to kick yourself for not seeing what Future You can so easily see.

Working for your dad is a mistake. Not the character-building kind that I mentioned above. Ignore that and take the job with the professor instead. Seriously.

You’re still going to really like ramen from a packet, especially the “beef” flavor, which, FYI, doesn’t have beef in it.

My parents are world travelers. I mean this in a very literal sense: they have been to every continent. They’ve been to over 100 countries. They have travel buddies they’ve met in Costa Rica and Egypt and for goodness sakes, Antarctica.

As this is the way things go, I hated traveling. I hated the lack of control over not knowing where we were going to eat. I cried in Zurich when my backpack was stolen. I cried on the Great Wall of China when I missed my boyfriend. I cried on a train in Rome from lack of sleep, in London from too hot soup, in Paris from the stench of dog poo and the funny looks Frenchmen gave us (that one was valid–France is racist, not idyllic).

I cried because I never had a say in things. I had the flu in Rome, but it was the day the Pope was saying Mass, so I had to go see the Pope with a one hundred and four fever. I had just had a nervous breakdown before we went to Beijing, but I had to pretend I hadn’t, because my parents wanted to take me to Beijing, damnit. It was exotic and special and absolutely the worst nightmare. I hated how I couldn’t go on a normal vacation to the beach and read books like everyone else. I just wanted normal! I wanted a normal family and normal responsibilities and normal vacation!

When my parents went to Spain my senior year of high school, I put my foot down. I told them I wasn’t going. I was old enough to stay home, so why couldn’t I? They were disbelieving. I mean, who doesn’t want a free trip to Spain? Maybe the girl who cries at the Great Wall, that’s who. I wanted to sit at home and eat Taco Bell every day and watch The Real World in the basement.

And I did, and lo, it was every single one of my dreams come true! Here was a world where I didn’t have to wear a fanny pack under my sweatshirt in fear of pickpockets! Here was a world where I could order a 59 cent Taco Supreme and know exactly what I was getting! Here was a world with my own bed, without my parents, without jetlag, without customs agents, with every form of gluttony and sloth a girl could dream of.

In some ways, I convinced myself that all of this was about travel, and not about my family’s weird Wes Anderson Movie-like dynamics. I hated traveling. HATED IT. I tried to do it as little as possible.

It wasn’t until last year that the bug that bit my parents started to nip me too. I suddenly had thoughts like, “I wonder what it feels like in a subway in Brooklyn right now?” and “I wonder how many types of ramen I could get in Tokyo,” or “I wonder if they still sell that orange chocolate gelato in that little shop in Rome.” I dream about it sometimes, and I let go, and it feels so nice. Other places feel like other planets, or maybe separate dimensions. What is this world without laundry and cooking and cleaning and helping with homework? Suddenly, I want a magic portal to take me to these separate dimensions, to travel away, away, away.

I feel like I’m trapped (like a baby in a box)?

It’s because I’m bogged down with responsibilities and children and work and animals. I am never not doing something in my waking hours anymore. Even my reading material has veered into things I should or have to read for work or writing. And then I close my eyes and think about sitting in a stuffy train station in London in the summer when I can’t possibly do any of the things I have to do at home, and it seems like utter bliss.

Now I get the form of escapism my parents were after: from work and kids and house maintenance and bills. None of it exists in the traveling world. And then I realized that what my parents were seeking from traveling was exactly what I was seeking in staying home: I wanted a simpler world, one without being bossed around by them on schedules or itineraries or arbitrary rules. I wanted the escape from the things that plagued me. And they wanted the exact same thing.

I used to lament that I didn’t do anything wild in my youth. I never dated recklessly or did drugs or even broke a bone. I didn’t experience life, or so I thought. I didn’t have a Gap Year backpacking throughout Europe and Asia and hitchhiking and staying in grubby youth hostels. I got married at 22, and I had a baby at 26, and that was it. That’s it for me. There will be no Gap Year.

Except that sometimes I think about sitting on the sofa in my sweats while my parents were away, eating my Taco Supremes and sipping my Coke, and thinking, Life can’t get any better. And in some ways, I was right. The mundane was my escape, the exotic rote and awful and a burden. My Gap Year was my four years at college, soaking in all the normal relationships I never experienced at home, understanding what it was like to have good friends, to have backstabbing friends, to go to parties, to eat bland American food. How wondrous this egg and asparagus casserole is! (Okay, I never once thought that.) But I ate a lot of waffles and bagels and something called tetrazzini. I got a less-than-minimum-wage job. It was all so NORMAL. And that was my Gap Year, my backpacking around Europe adventure, because I realized I lived in backwards land, with the strangest family around. I really, really got into eating Taco Bell then.

But it’s better now. Life is blessedly normal. I can depend on it from day to day, and I’m not going to be forced to travel to Milan (boo hoo for me!) if I don’t want to travel to Milan. Dysfunction is hard to understand when it’s veiled in things like exotic trips, but it comes down to having to feeling safe. I never felt safe, or normal, not in Milan or Beijing or Paris. But I feel safe now. Even with all the responsibilities, even with the bags forming under my eyes, even with the desire to escape, I know I’m, in some senses, suspended in my Gap Year forever, in a happy way.

And maybe now when the traveling bug bites me, I can drag my kids along.

Then I can instill in them the lifelong lesson: sometimes you just want Taco Bell instead.

This photo (Keshav, 8 months) sums up how I feel lately: messy, a little bewildered, and slightly pudgy.

I’m applying for jobs, and it turns out applying for jobs sucks. I haven’t been in this position in seven years, so my mind was a little bit fuzzy about the process, but now I’m clear: this is no fun at all. I do not like waiting for my fate in my email box every morning. I don’t like constantly refreshing job boards instead of doing other useful things, like eating cheese. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way out of the waiting and the applying and the finger-crossing. If you have some spare fingers lying around, could you cross them for me? Thanks.

***

I turned in a final revision of my novel to my agent, and now I’m waiting to hear her feedback. Of course, now that it’s in, I keep thinking of ways to change it. (Maybe it should involve SUPERHEROES!) I am not very good at waiting and leaving things alone. It is my lifetime project.

***

I’m editing Office Crush now, and my plan is to self-publish it on Amazon, in ebook format only (for now). My deadline is the end of the school year, which, whoa, is SOON. I guess I should be working on that, huh?

***

Alison just tweeted that we should make a Pacific Northwest dating guide based on The Twilight Saga.

Here are a few  I thought of:

• Don’t date anyone more than 90 years older than you.
• If he’s not stalking you in your bedroom and watching you sleep, it’s not true love.
• Real men sparkle.
• First dates should consist of tree-climbing, piggy-back rides, and lots of silent, deep staring.
• Clumsy is hot.
• If you have a genuine interest in someone with a common background, and, bonus! he’s Indian and hot and you love the way he looks and spending time with him, you should DEFINITELY not date him. He might be a wolf (like all other Indians you know).

I can’t think of anymore, but if you have some, add in the comments? I need the distraction from constantly refreshing my inbox.

One of the ways I learned to write a book was to discover that characters only ring true to a reader if their actions consistently and constantly match up to their personalities. This is a bit unfair, because sometimes characters have to do things to move the plot forward, and thus you need to create characters that would do the thing that would move the plot forward. Duh, right?

I had a bit of a learning curve on this one, because I like to believe people are complex, ever-evolving animals and can’t be pinned and characterized by little actions. It’s not true that Sarah will always do Thing X–maybe she’ll do Thing Y this time! You never know, she has free will! And so, my characters were all over the place. It wasn’t until I started to look very closely at my own personality that I saw how wrong I was about people. We’re not going to do something different every single time. We’re going to do the same thing every time. Our failures are familiar and well-practiced.

For instance, when I’m feeling down, am I going to eat a lot of things? Why yes! It is a guarantee! Maybe I will also read a romance novel and bemoan all of my faults publically on the Internet. I will definitely call myself untalented or at least stupid and worthless. Most of you haven’t even met me and you know this rings true. This is my character.

After that, writing became a lot easier. I could write about my characters and know they were just like real people! So freeing!

What wasn’t freeing was the realization that I AM A CHARACTER. I am a character in my own life, circling around the same problems over and over: self-esteem, lack of worth, shyness and awkwardness. To this I said: Eff You (I was around a lot of kids at the time of my realization). EFF YOU.

But disguising swear words doesn’t really get me out of my character. I decided that what I needed to do was find out what I wanted out of life. Was it to be an Internet writer for fun and profit? Just the fun part, it turned out. Was it to be a stay-at-home mom to a mass of children? My ears bled and told me to pack up my uterus because the show was over on that particular carnival ride. Was it to make money or buy a bigger house or be fancy or get another degree or…WHAT?

I decided: I don’t know. I keep struggling with all these decisions, not knowing the answers and yet feeling like I NEED TO KNOW THE ANSWERS. I need to move forward in the novel of my life, to know the next plot point, to get things going. But I don’t know. I really didn’t know about wanting another kid for YEARS. I don’t know how many wishy-washy posts I have on this site lamenting just that decision. Then one day I woke up and I knew. I knew that the answer was absolutely, positively, h-e-double hockey sticks NO. It wasn’t in any kind of sad, defeated way that I made this realization, either. I heard the sound of a newborn crying and I cringed and heaved a sigh of relief that it wasn’t MY newborn. Maternal instincts, I ain’t got ‘em.

The next thing I decided in my life as a character was that I was not dumb or unlucky or unhappy or shy or awkward. I decided I did not like those flaws. There are some flaws I could take on more readily: too hairy and maybe a spendthrift, obsessed with control and order. Those were all true, but…but…I just realized, oh goodness, I’m not dumb. So many of my struggles came from thinking I was dumb (for no good reason–I got straight As, I got into excellent universities, I won scholarships, etc.), and it was time to end that train at the last station. I am not dumb.

And goodness knows that despite some awful things in my childhood, I’m not unlucky. I’m the luckiest 0.1% that ever lived. I have so few complaints about my life. I love my children and my house and my husband and my neighborhood. I am financially secure enough to splurge on the FANCY boxed macaroni and cheese at the grocery store. I am thin-ish and in good health and totally and completely employable.

If I am unhappy, the world is doomed. That was the next thing to go. I don’t want to be unhappy. And it’s actually a DECISION. It is. I don’t mean depression, which really has little to do with happiness or quality of life. I meant that I was living a charmed life and studiously looking away from it. I have everything. Enough with the unhappiness.

So here I am. I changed my character defects. No longer insecure or dumb or unhappy. It opened things up, like letting go of the idea that this blog could or should make me money (because I don’t want that, and it was leading me down a road of unhappiness in checking site stats and questioning sponsored posts and these are just not things I want to think about in my life). I let go of freelancing for the same reason. I let go of the idea that I needed to be the best mom ever. I’m not ever going to be that. And that opened up other avenues: going back to work, applying for full-time positions, getting rid of little things around the house people gave me or I bought in a fit of self-doubt. I’ve filled trash bags of tchotchkes. I’ve met with the school principal to talk about issues with my kids’ teachers, because, you know, I’m not dumb or shy and I GOT THIS THING.

Life has been changing. Life is busy. I hope to be fully employed outside of the house soon. I hope I get good news about my novels, which I used to think of as not very good, but now I see it: they’re funny and intelligent and well-written and I think you’d really like them. I’ve wanted to let go of that character defect for a while.

I let go of being miserable. I let go of the idea that I have ultimate control, because I’m just a character, and maybe this is just my story arc. But I can control my defects, at the very least. But I’m going to need some foreshadowing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

In libraries, there’s an anecdote that twenty percent of a library collection gets used eighty percent of the time. When I learned about that, I thought: twenty percent? That’s nothing!

Last night as I was preparing dinner, I listened to this NPR story on raising multiracial children. In it, there was a statistic that eighty percent of those under 40 years of age would “be fine” if someone in their family married outside their race. That leaves twenty percent of people NOT fine with it.

Twenty percent? That’s a lot.

Who are these twenty percent, I wondered. Yesterday as I was taking out the trash, I saw an older couple walking by our house, and the man looked at me and spit on my garage. He SPIT ON MY GARAGE. I live in the hippy dippiest liberal-ist city in America, and someone SPIT ON MY GARAGE. Was it because of the color of my skin? Was he just an asshole? I don’t know, but I was fuming, and I was fuming hours later because I said nothing.

Every single time someone gives me the stink-eye, I think it could be because of the color of my skin. This is 2013, this is America, and I am not even African American. I cannot imagine what it is like to be black in America, because being brown is hard enough.

When the World Trade Center was bombed in the 1990s, I remember my dad driving me home from high school and fearing for my life. I thought maybe people would attack us because we looked a heck of a lot like terrorists.

And that’s what it comes down to, I suppose. We never get over those flinching moments when people call us dot heads or terrorists. We never get over the twenty percent. It’s always inside me, even in 2013, even though I’m married to a white guy and one of my children has freckles, for goodness sake. FRECKLES. I have a befreckled child and a man spit on my garage. Maybe because I have a freckled child.

I was talking with Gregg about the NPR story and the twenty percent at dinner, and the boys asked me, “What do you mean that people don’t like it?” And then we got to explain that some people think it’s morally wrong that their mom and dad (and lots of their friends’ parents) are married. And of course, as this is 2013, they wrinkled their brows in confusion and asked, “But why?”

And we answered the only way we knew how. “We really don’t know.”

“Let’s play tag!” said one boy.

“I don’t know about that. Did anyone bring a graphic novel?” said another.

***

As we’re driving past a billboard with a couple in a bed, one boy said to the other, “OH MAN. OH MAN. That sign was bad. It was so, so bad.”

“What? Why? What was it?” asked the other.

“I can’t even—I CAN’T EVEN.”

“Tell me!”

“It was a Sleep Number ad. I can’t even.”

“TELL ME. You have to turn around, Keshav’s Mom, so I can see this sign.”

“So, I should tell your parents we’re late because we had to look at a Sleep Number sign?”

Both boys in unison: “Uh, yeah.”

***

Right after lunch: “So, when’s lunch?”

***

Me, to the boys: “If you misbehave, I will call your meanest parent.”

***

Looking at a sign with a couple kissing, one boy says very loudly, “THAT IS THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I’VE EVER SEEN!”

Me: “But I’m sure you’ve seen your parents kiss!”

Him: “You’re ruining my life.”

Keshav, who said almost nothing the whole day during the ruckus, gasps as we’re on a walk: It’s snowing flowers, Mom.

(I got the best one.)

I’ve forgotten how to blog. I used to be able to blog about my eyebrow hair and my skirts and cheese and now I think, “But that would just be white noise!”

As if the Internet were anything but white noise?

I think the problem is that blogging has become something that it didn’t used to be white noise. Not in a bad way, but just in a way that makes me not want to do it as much. It’s become more infiltrated with ads, and if you corner me at a party and we talk about professional blogging, you would probably hear me utter the terrible phrases, “elimination of trust capital!” and “copywriting monkeys!” and “future of hypertext going down in flames!!!” or some other such dramatic declarations.

I first started reading blogs in 2001. I think my pothead brother introduced me to them, and then I couldn’t stop reading them on low-level sites like LiveJournal and DiaryLand (oh my GAH DIARYLAND). I remember being in awe of anyone with an audience, of anyone who could craft daily minutiae in thrilling memoirs about young adulthood–becoming teachers or starting marriages or dating or getting a first house or drinking too much and then going to work hungover.

I read and I read and I read and I read it all, feeling for the first time a real connection with people I would never know. But I never wrote.

Now I write and I write and I write and I write, and I never read other blogs.

I know what changed. The enchantment of blogging, after 12 years, has lost its spark. I used to think of brilliant writers like Finslippy or Sweet Juniper and shake my head asking why they would EVER STOP CONSTANTLY BLOGGING. Think of the career potential! Think of the growing audience!

And now I realize that there is only so much of yourself you can give to the Internet before you realize that a lot of it is not real, it’s white noise, that the accolades or the emails or the twitter follows or the page views are temporary highs that leave me empty afterwards. If I’m not willing to trade my trust capital as a writer in order to shill Method hand soap or Hyundai SUVs, then I’m not going to make it as a professional blogger. I’ve said all of this before, and not that long ago, I know. But it’s still bothering me, how blogging used to be this revolutionary THING, and its content has turned into ads for Pampers and the like.

But revolutionary things become old hat. It can’t last forever etc etc etc. Whatcha gonna do, girl’s gotta get paid. I KNOW. I get that. AND YET. And yet I’m distraught because I just…I miss the 2001 of blogging.

Am I like the guy who cried “sell out”? I am. I totally am. Blogging is a sell out because there’s no other way to make money out of this. We’re not going to be NYT bestsellers because we have blogs. Everyone has a blog. Blogs are a joke! I just read a book where a character said that it was either blogging or fighting that was going to help him, and he didn’t want to be a blogger for God’s sake.

Because….why? I think about what blogs used to be, and it reminds me of every single thing written in a newspaper opinion or advice column, only better, because it was raw and real and unfiltered and not from some bloated white guy with no life experiences I could recognize. It was book reviews and movie reviews and fashion advice and thoughts about parenting. It was Dear Abby and Roger Ebert and Bob Greene and Dave Barry, but amplified by ten million, because there were so many, many talented writers out there giving their own unique versions to us.

Are we still doing that as a collective? Or are we all together on a diet or tittering like middle schoolers about which shoes we should wear? I used to have a swear word when my reader would fill with long posts. I’d shake my fist and say, ‘WORDS!’ I even talked to people about how, professionally, the shorter the post, the paragraph, the sentence, the better. We’re just too fucking flooded with Dear Abbys and Bob Greenes, and yet we feel it is our tiring duty as members of the blogosphere to keep on reading out of obligation.

So posts get shorter, or picture heavy. Or bloggers disappear or update infrequently. Or we inundate our readers with white noise in an effort to get our page views up. I’m guilty of all of them, when all I really want to do is for this place to be my diary. That’s what it started out as, right? Online journals for the extroverted introverts? And then we all found out that sharing our deep dark secrets with the world was kind of fun! And then, from there, we got to writing about fucking Pampers absorbency. But we’re not copywriters. We’re BLOGGERS. AND THERE’S AN ACTUAL DIFFERENCE.

There are a few exceptions, but me and you, we’re not the exceptions. We’re not going to suddenly skyrocket to fame in a viral post–and if there IS a viral post, it most likely still won’t take you to the top. Everything is temporary. None of this is real. I mean, the Internet is this THING and it’s not even physical. There’s no here here!

Of course none of this is true, in a sense. I started a blog well after the sell out phase, even happily excited for the sell out portion of my life! It wasn’t until I tried it that I realized how much I didn’t like it, that my husband came home and told me, “That post was not written by my wife. That was weird.” It WAS weird. It was not in me.

I get that some people DO want to be copywriters. I do not begrudge the copywriter. I think ads are better written than most novels.

And I do not begrudge bloggers a buck, nor am I ungrateful to the Internet. The Internet has changed my life for the better. I was such a different person when I started this blog, with the hopes of being a Finslippy or a Sweet Juniper (only to find out that that was impossible, and that I was always going to be a Shalini). It brought me friendships and connections and helped me see myself as myself in a way that nothing ever has and I doubt nothing will again. It is the most amazing privilege to have a blog, so fuck those people who think bloggers aren’t fantastic. THEY ARE. WE ARE.

I suppose my problem is that there are a lot of people who just want to write their personal journals without the copywriting, but their hands are tied. We can’t be newspaper columnists, because newspapers are just blogs now. We have to fill our posts with advertising, even if we’re not copywriters, if we want to have a sliver of what’s being offered. And that’s just it–we’re unwilling to pay for content that has always been free, and we’re disgruntled when there are workarounds like sponsored posts, because it changes the whole nature of blogging from something small and personal to something corporate and unreal.

I don’t think there’s a way to go back to the 2001 of blogging, not that we’d REALLY want to. I mean, fucking DiaryLand? No. But I think there is a way, if we really try, to keep at least the edges of ourselves here in the center of each website, to not let our minds wander to bills and checking accounts and Pampers absorbency here, and I think we (as readers) need to figure out a way to sustain our writers so we don’t shred them into nothingness and then wonder where people went, or why bloggers who used to be so raw and open can’t write about their depression or their broken marriages any longer, but they instead pop up on Hyundai ads with a neutral smile and an empty eyes. We’ve sucked the marrow from a few of those bloggers.

We’re not supporting ourselves here, and we shouldn’t be surprised when we turn into white noise. I don’t know how to change that except to write the truest things I can, to not shorten my paragraphs or rely on images or write about anything I don’t feel like writing about, because that’s the whole reason we started anyway. We’re an outlet for each other, away from the white noise of the world, and I hope we can get back to that, for the sake of writers, but mostly for the sake of us, the readers.

I totally forgot, again, about reading a classic novel. I am calling that project a big fat fail. I also forgot to write down what I read, so this may be totally wrong. Also also, I read hardly anything.

33. Walking Disaster by Jamie McGuire

I read Beautiful Disaster last year and I really enjoyed it, even though I thought main characters were psychotic. This was essentially the same exact book all over again. It was supposed to be a retelling of the first novel, and it was. WOMP WOMP.

34. Stay by Allie Larkin

Cute, but not my genre. I think I’d recommend it to people who like Jennifer Weiner. There’s nothing WRONG with the book, and I think books like this make good movies. But I think I’m missing the key element in my brain that makes people love the adult women’s fiction genre (and I have an oversupply of the key elements for romance and YA).

35. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

Yowza incredible knock my socks off good. Elizabeth gave me this as a present, and I cannot say enough good things about her, her taste in books, or this book. ALL GOOD.

36. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

I should have liked this book. It was very well-written. It had a great plot. It was well-paced. AND YET. I don’t know! I didn’t like it! And I don’t know why!

37. Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers

YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK IT’S ABOUT ASSASSIN NUNS NO REALLY AND IT’S SO GOOD ALL CAPS THE END.

38. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

This book was just…I’m speechless. I loved it. It was not so much perfect–there were a lot of issues with plot that I had (including one inconsistency), and the main female character was a big bore, and should NOT have been anyone’s love interest. But still, it was achingly good and smart and well-written and I am just in awe of his writing. It was SO SMART and the way the plot is framed is SO SMART and…yeah. SO SMART.

39. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

This is an advice column in book form. It’s the Dear Sugar column from the Rumpus, and I think Strayed’s insights into human psychology are so good, and then when she pairs them with her own experiences, it makes for, like, group therapy. That’s what this book is: group therapy. It will make you sob in the best way possible.

(I have found I am being pickier with reading material and it is making me SO MUCH HAPPIER.)

When Gregg walked into the doorway of the apartment where I sat on an old, stain-covered sofa watching a movie with a bunch of boyfriends that were not mine, I did not have the love at first sight thought. I had this thought: Him.

He might kiss me.

I was twenty years old and had been kissed platonically too many times. Once I was kissed non-platonically by an asshole, and it made me yearn for all those boys who were actually honest with me, expressing zero sexual desire.

But.

I wanted a kiss. From HIM.

I was going to get a kiss. At least that much.

The first time I kissed him a few weeks later, I was drunk and he was drunk. I wanted that kiss, I told myself as I was leaving the party. I stumbled. I balanced myself with my hands on his shoulders. It’s just a kiss. Kiss him.

I leaned forward and missed the middle of his lips, giving him a sloppy peck on the side of his mouth. He smiled broadly, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

The next time I saw him, I thought he might flirt. I thought he would ask me out. He walked me to my car in the parking lot and stretched out his arms, asking me to hug him. He was shaking, but then it was central Illinois in the winter and he was wearing a t-shirt. Of course he was shaking.

After he let go, he said, “Can I call you some time?”

I said of course, biting back my grin. If I were at all athletically inclined, I would have back-flipped through the parking lot. I was not, so I drove away in my teal Saturn with the heat turned up singing to The Cardigans instead.

The next time I kissed him was on his twenty first birthday. He was drunk and I was a little less drunk, but I still made the excuse of lying down on his bed that smelled very much like Gregg in the best way possible (and truth be told I sometimes sniff his shirts before they go in the laundry just for that smell). I pulled him over to me. It’s just a kiss. And I kissed him again. Square on the mouth. Then our mouths were open and we were all over each other. Passionate. Fiery.

My toes tingled for hours after that kiss.

It was maybe the best kiss of my life. This was the man I was going to marry. I could feel it everywhere in me. This. Was. It.

It’s the fourteenth anniversary of that kiss.

When I asked Gregg about it years later, he scratched his chin and shook his head. “We kissed? Huh. No memory of that.”

Happy 35th birthday, you asshole.