#the hot new trends seems to be saying THIS PIECE WAS ADOPTED!!! instead of SOLE

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

texts to use to recreate me from a vat of biogel

[chroniclesofawkwardness]

Words and Fishes

I shaved my balls yesterday. 

It had been a minute, and though they were far from resembling an overgrown jungle, they looked like they needed it. In another piece, I wrote about being a late-adopter of the manscaping trend. That’s still true, but adopting the trend didn’t mean that lost my humble southern Ohio roots in an abyss of personal hygiene and marketing tactics meant to make me marvel about how the trimmer I was using (which became conveniently outdated within weeks of my purchase) was so gentle to the touch, you could use it on a balloon animal without popping it. I took pride in coming to my ingenious realization to use the advertisements that came in the mail on Tuesdays and sometimes Wednesdays as mats to catch the trimmings instead of relying solely on the mats that came with my original order and trying to stretch them out as long as possible so I wouldn’t have to pay for replacements (if they’re even available). 

As I carefully trimmed my way around my balls and the surrounding areas, I’d occasionally glance down at my improvised mats to gauge my results, as well as new towels, a shower curtain liner, and candle positioned throughout the bathroom. I thought about how it all started. 

Words With Friends (WWF) is one of the few games I play. It’s a modern mobile take on a classic --Scrabble-- that allows me to flex and strengthen my vocabulary muscles. When I started in 2011, there was only one tile style, and there were no advertisements to stare through between games. There’ve been some moments I couldn’t believe I got such a high score with a single word or combination of words, but many more (thanks to the Hindsight power-up in WWF 2) when I shook my head at missed opportunities for more points. How could I have been so blind? The best play was right before my eyes. 

I know games like WWF are designed to keep me hooked since Zynga has to feed their hungry application developers, but I recently got hooked in another way. 

Ever the competitor, I hated losing, even at an inconsequential game like WWF. If I won a game because the other player had timed out, I didn’t feel like I’d earned it because both players hadn’t competed until the end. Who knows what he or she had going on in their life that prevented them from making their next move before the clock ran out?

WWF also has a chat feature you could use to talk with your opponent. I avoided using it for the longest time because for the first several years I played the game, I only played against people I knew in real life. One of my most common initial opponents was my aunt. For months, I beat her every time we played. I relished in kicking her ass all over the virtual game board, which became the biggest drain on my phone’s battery.

One day out of the blue, my aunt’s skill seemed to increase exponentially for no apparent reason. She was suddenly able to beat me (and handily so) three or four times in a row, which irritated me to no end. As quickly and inexplicably as her winning streak began, she stopped playing. The abrupt end to our battles pissed me off so much that I haven’t spoken to her about it since. 

                                                       ***

Eventually, I decided to take a chance and start playing WWF against random opponents. I don’t know if I was looking for a new challenge, or acting out because I couldn’t come to grips with the fact my aunt had finally beaten me. By this time, WWF had a Match of the Day feature that invited you to play against the kind of unpredictable opponent I was looking for. One day, I tapped on the thumbnail of a profile belonging to Kristina from Australia and started playing a game.

She played back fairly quickly and proved to be a tough opponent, winning three or four games for each one I won against her. Like I said, I hated losing. Even though my numbers weren’t great against Kristina, I kept challenging her. 

Once, Kristina timed out (which usually occurs after about 10-12 days), giving me a win. I started another game against her. When she played back, I told her the same thing I’ve already told you -- I hate cheap victories that are a result of an elapse of time rather than a display of skill. She offered an apology that she’d been busy. I didn’t expect to hear from her again because the time difference between the Land Down Under and the Buckeye State is anywhere between thirteen and sixteen hours. 

Not long after, she messaged me with a simple: “Hello David.” I replied in kind. We exchanged small talk for a few days. I remember wondering how someone who looked as strikingly beautiful as she did in her picture could be interested in talking to me. I told her I imagined she got all kinds of messages from guys all the time because of her good looks. She said she did, but she ignored most of them, adding that one guy asked her to marry him and be a mother to his three children. She declined and blocked him from contacting her, or so she said. Kristina even told me about a stalker who followed her around for a year before being caught. She said she’d never been so scared. Even though we’d never met, I felt genuine concern for her. No one deserves to be harassed by someone who isn’t honest about their intentions, someone who prefers instead to lurk cowardly in the shadows. 

Another night, I messaged Kristina saying good evening Ohio time. She wrote back wishing me a good evening NYC (New York City) time. I thought she was just messing with me and I told her so. When I asked if she was visiting NYC, she told me she was living in Hartsdale, working on sponsorship from New York Medical Center (NYMC), and working at a hospital in White Plains. Kristina was very proud of the fact that she’d been selected from a field of three hundred applicants. She added that she’d come to America to get a fresh start after her marriage to her ex-husband Stuart had ended. Her four brothers, Garry, Steven, Michael, and Richard (her twin) drank beer on Scarborough Beach in solidarity with their sister when she’d decided to leave Stuart. She went so far as to say she’d be finishing her bridging visa in January, which would allow her to stay in the United States.

To the question of whether or not she had children, she said she had a daughter. My heart sank slightly because I was starting to feel a connection to Kristina sight unseen. I should have only wanted her Scrabble skills. I thought a child would only complicate things between us if we even got that far. Red flags were starting to pop up left and right, but I was already thinking with my little head. I had to ask, but I also should have known that most thirty-eight-year-old women (ironically, I was exactly two months older than Kristina) would have already had kids if they were planning on having them at all. I should have ended it right there, but Kristina explained that her daughter wasn’t her daughter. She and Stuart had adopted her, only to have her claimed by a biological aunt and taken to live in the United Kingdom.

Crisis averted, it almost seemed too good to be true.

                                                       ***

I began to open up more to Kristina as the days turned to nights and back again. I told her about how much I loved my grandfather, she told me about her grandmother who lived to be 104 and gave up playing tennis only after falling and breaking her hip shortly before her death. I figured Kristina must have gotten her love of tennis (a sport I’d played as a child), swimming, and golf honestly. I shared with her that my grandfather had been more of a father to my brother and me than he ever should have had to have been, and he too had lived a very active lifestyle until congestive heart failure began to slow him down so much that even he could not fully recover. 

She told me many times that she didn’t want gravity to take over as she aged. In reply, I’d point out that I had more to worry about than she did since I was exactly two months older than her. But, one thing I didn’t mention was that not wanting gravity to take over was the same rationale I’d been using for years when deciding to work out. I was afraid of turning into my dad, by which I mean having to watch my gut grow further and further past my belt until my waistline became nothing more than a proverbial line in the sand. A line I once said I’d never cross -- a line I’d move so far away from that despite a steadfast original promise to hold it, I could no longer see. Unlike my dad, I didn’t want to have to take a bag full of medications just to stay alive, even though I’d truly given up on life a long time ago.  

Not long after our grandparent conversation in the WWF chat, I began to trust Kristina enough to share some of my writings with her. I can’t remember if we were talking about how emotion and intent aren’t always conveyed well in text messages, or how I’d never quite mastered the use of emojis. Either way, something inspired me to share Ite, emoji est with her. If you haven’t read it, it’s the story of my eggplant emoji fiasco. She laughed hysterically and told me about the eggplants in her vegetable crisper. Kristina said that thanks to me, she’d never look at eggplant the same way again. For an instant, I thought it was odd that she had eggplants readily available. Most people probably don’t keep eggplants on hand. Still, I didn’t think twice about it until much later. 

If my ill-advised emoji choice ruined eggplants for the both of us, Kristina didn’t let that stop her from sharing stories of her mishaps. Once, she told me she’d spilled hot chocolate all over the white nightgown she was wearing as she sat in front of the fireplace. Another time, she told me she dropped a fish filet on her foot, but it still ended up in her tummy. I found it odd that she would still eat something after having dropped it, but I dismissed this a personality quirk of hers. I was becoming convinced that she was a klutz, just like me. 

Over the next few weeks, I’d discover that clumsiness was one of many traits and/or experiences Kristina and I had in common. I know now that I should have seen all of these commonalities (she’d grown up Catholic like me, her father had been a cop like mine) as significant red flags instead of opportunities to bond with her. At the time, I was too thrilled to meet someone with whom I shared so much to put an abrupt end to our interaction. If I’d known what was to come, I’d wish I had. 

One morning, I asked Kristina if there was anything she’d always wanted to try. Her response was skydiving. I said I wanted to dance the tango. We shared visions of tandem jumps and tango lessons. She said she had a red, thigh-high slit dress exactly like one the tiny emoji woman who was always ready to dance in my phone wore. Kristina said Richard had once dropped her while they were doing the tango, so I had to promise to be careful with her. I imagined our two bodies melting into one; our hearts pounding and sweat dripping in unison. I couldn’t wait to feel the shape of her body beneath her dress as we glided together across the dance floor. She purred at the thought of me in a tux. 

The more intense our conversations became, the more I entertained the idea of communicating with Kristina outside of the game. I offered her my phone number because it’s a man’s job to move things forward. She didn’t call or text me. Yet another red flag. I wondered if I’d blown it or gone too far since she didn’t reciprocate. In retrospect, this was another chance to walk away from her that I didn’t take, however obvious it was that I should have. I either couldn’t or chose not to see what was going on because I was too grateful for the attention of a beautiful woman read: thumbnail that I would have otherwise considered out of my league and never approached in real life. 

Around Christmas, she told me her co-workers were beginning to notice a change in her and surmised that she must be in love. The women wanted to know all about her mystery man; the guys wanted to know what I had that they didn’t. “Personality” was her answer. The rum balls she made for the office Christmas party were a hit. She was the only person I’d ever met apart from my mother who made them, and she admitted to being a piggy when it came to eating them. It seemed our connection was deepening over most trivial things, which made it so much more powerful. I never told her that one holiday season while I was living in Serbia, my mom made rum balls and mailed them to me. I was so happy that I posted a picture of them on Facebook.  

One morning, Kristina messaged me saying she had feelings for me and didn’t know what to do with them. Somehow, she said, I’d managed to knock down the walls she’d been building around her heart since she left Stuart, and she’d never felt the same way about another man that she felt about me. She couldn’t figure out how she’d fallen for me. Despite her curiosity, she promised she wouldn’t scroll back through our WWF chat to find out. She closed our exchange of messages that morning by saying that she wanted me to make love to her. 

                                                       ***

I thought this was a great idea. Still, I couldn’t rest on whatever virtual laurels I thought I’d won by having her suggest lovemaking. Instead, I used whatever literary skill I thought I had to paint verbal pictures of the two of us together. I had neither the stamina, nor the potential STDs of a porn star (Kristina was oddly forthcoming about both her lack of STDs and disdain for condoms. Red flag... Red flag...), but I was genuine in my expression of my desire to truly explore her, ravish her, and ejaculate as a choice rather than a punchline. Episodes of our chat became increasingly sexually explicit, both of us contributing content. Sexual tension even spilled over into our WWF games, both players passing up points to play erotic words or make references emotionally charged content of speech bubbles hours or minutes past. 

It was wonderful to finally connect with someone on not just a thumbnail but an emotional level. I never told her about my mild Cerebral Palsy, but when she told me she dreamed of specializing in orthopedics, I was convinced I’d found a keeper. I would never immediately volunteer my disability status to a potential partner. Yet I’m sure that somewhere in the darkest corners of the Internet, there are Pickup Artist forums that discuss tactics guys with disabilities can use to get girls. I can see thread now, with posts by guys with usernames like CPaul or DysplasiaDarryl:  

Tell a girl about your autobiography, Limp: The Story of My Life. Joke about how you were referring to your leg, not your dick. Ask if she wants to see. If she asks which one or gets the Iceberg Slim reference, assure her your third leg works just fine. If she refuses to investigate on her own, she wasn’t for you anyway. She’s probably a slut who imagines herself having high standards. The girls you really want will get dripping wet at just the thought of being with an artist.

I didn’t think any tactic would have worked on Kristina anyway. Why would I have used something as hollow as a few canned lines or routines with her anyway? She’d have seen right through it all. Besides, I didn’t need to. I’d won her over naturally. My disability was the result of something that happened to me a long time ago. There was no need for me to be angry about it, or keep it locked away like some kind of dark secret. How I chose to handle it would say more about my character than any reaction of hers ever could have. At the end of the day, I didn’t think she would care, so why should I?

Mom and I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at my brother and sister-in-law’s house. She wanted to be there to watch my niece and nephew open presents before Christmas became less magical and more an opportunity for awkward family photos. I can’t say I blame her. After all the gifts had been opened, my niece repeatedly tried to break a board she’d gotten as a training tool for martial arts; my nephew rotated between riding his new bike around the house and nearly flying his new drone into the oven any time it was open. Mom milled about the kitchen, offering to help my brother and sister-in-law prepare a meal. 

As for me, instead of spending time with real people, I’d steal away into an adjacent room to check my phone every time it buzzed. I was less concerned with making moves in WWF than I was with seeing if Kristina had messaged me. I felt bad that she couldn’t spend Christmas with her family. Her mother died when Kristina was three, her father had passed away more recently; her brothers were on another continent. Each time checking my phone revealed a message from Kristina, I felt not only validation but strength. She wasn’t the only one who’d built walls around her heart that were beginning to crumble.

                                                       ***

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I’d finally connected with someone smart, sexy, athletic, and perhaps most importantly a deep thinker. Kristina was reflecting so much on our future together that it’s almost as if she knew how to put my mind at ease before I could even get nervous. Sure, I was a bit taken aback by her insistence on how clean and STD-free she was, but that was only one instance in which she was all too willing to share. For example, I’d always heard that people who have more money than they know what to do with are usually very quiet about it, especially if it’s family wealth that’s grown with them for generations. So, when Kristina volunteered that she was financially secure, I was surprised, slightly skeptical, but most of all curious. 

To hear her tell it, her father (who’d given up his career as a cop for one as a farmer) had accumulated a fortune buying and selling horses. He’d subsequently done very well for himself with stocks and investments, leaving Kristina and her brothers shares upon his death. In terms of which stocks or investments, she only mentioned Bitcoin, which she was able to sell before its value crashed, and an Australian Super Fund, which she claimed had once earned her $81,000.00 in three weeks. At the end of the day, she said, she could afford never to work another day in her life if she so chose. I had a hard time wrapping my Southern Ohio barely-middle-class head around the numbers. 

A woman with no kids or STDs who’s both secure and interested in me? It seemed too good to be true. 

Despite babies spitting and old men hitting on her, Kristina told me how grateful she was to the staff of NYMC for their hospitality and all she’d learned. Sure, she occasionally had drug seekers tell her to go back to Australia after she’d refused their requests, but her boss had been accommodating enough to actually allow her to go back to Australia when one of her brothers had gotten into an accident two years ago. They’d told her to take all the time she needed. 

As much as she loved NYMC, Kristina admitted that she didn’t like New York City very much. She said she was willing to come to Columbus to build a future with me beyond tango and skydiving lessons. As our plans to meet cam closer and closer to fruition, I realized certain aspects of my lifestyle could use upgrade. This is when ordered manscaping tools, cologne, a candle, and a new shower curtain liner. I didn’t stop there. I added new pillows, pillowcases bath towels, and bathmats. I’d be lying if I said these purchases weren’t made at least partially with Kristina in mind (I wouldn’t want to explore a forest, so she shouldn’t have had to either), but they were also very much needed upgrades, no matter how much she’d become my weakness and I’d become her strength. 

The Hugo Boss cologne I chose had hints of orange peel and bamboo for Christ’s sake. The “Sexy Man” candle supposedly also had the aroma of a man’s cologne. Kristina said she was curious to find out what the candle smelled like. Unfortunately, we’d never get to make that discovery. I received neither the cologne nor the candle in the mail. On the day they supposedly arrived, I got an email from UPS with a picture of both items in front of my door. But, when I got home from work that night, they were nowhere to be found. The UPS driver who’d delivered them came out to my place the next day asking where I’d looked for my packages. He advised me to file a claim with UPS. UPS in turn advised me to file a claim with Amazon and try to get my money back.

As luck would have it, I got through to an Amazon customer service representative about seven minutes too early the following Monday. Initially, I was told I had two options. The first was to have replacement items sent to me, the second was a refund. Of course I wanted replacements I said. I had to have masculine fragrances to balance out the intoxicating scent of the $29.99 Ambrosia perfume Kristina said she’d be wearing. She’d let me guess which part of her body she’d place the fourth drop of perfume on. She’d promised to leave a bottle at my place to remind me of her. She’d bought lingerie for my eyes only that the store employee told her she was born to wear. She’d told me she slept naked even though I didn’t ask (though she wondered how much sleep we’d be getting). I had a lot riding on this. Could replacements be sent to me?  

No. 

Since I’d called before 4 P.M. Pacific time (it was 6:57 P.M. ET by this point), my only choice was to a refund. I ended up ordering cologne and bath towels through one of Amazon’s competitors.

                                                       ***

Even having Kristina in mind while I was trying to make these upgrades was a mistake, but I was acting according to The Awful Truth of where a man’s heart is truly located and giving her credit for things she didn’t earn. For instance, I told her that I had no concerns about her because we’d taken “precautions” even though we’d never met, or video chatted. In reality, we hadn’t done shit but type messages back and forth. 

I mentioned that in my experience, fraudsters we usually very demanding, aggressive, and single-minded. They want what they want and they don’t stop until they get it. As proof, I offered my experience with a WWF player who’d messaged me a few days ago, before I even had a chance to accept her invitation to play. That player wanted to know if I was single right off the bat. She demanded that I give her my phone number so we could text, be friends, and maybe more. I blocked her almost immediately. In response, Kristina asked if she was too friendly. “No. You’re just right,” I replied. Goldilocks would have thrown up in her mouth. I was too deeply under the influence of Kristina’s digeridoo siren song to care, and she knew it. 

After the first of the year, we transitioned to chatting on Google Hangouts. I sent her a recent photo and asked for one of her in return. She sent me what she said was her most recent one, in which she had long brown hair, dark brown eyes, and wore a white suit. Even though the photo didn’t look anything like her thumbnail form WWF, it did make fa perfect headshot for a medical professional in New York City. As for my photo, she said I had a kind face.

I may have had a kind face, but I never saw Kristina’s real face. She would call me through Hangouts, as she once did even while locked in the morgue, hiding from an active shooter (all the more reason to get out of New York City, she said), but our calls were voice-only. As for photos, she sent me only two more throughout our entire conversation. One was of her dog Buddy, who despite his Australian origins, had once been quarantined for eight hours at the Perth airport when they’d arrived home from the United Kingdom. The other was of her when she was about twelve. She was hanging upside down in a tree, a huge smile on her face. 

Kristina gave me the impression that having four brothers made her bit of a tomboy, meaning whatever her brothers did, she did too. It didn’t matter whether they were hanging upside down from trees, or servicing cars. She could do it all. I was falling for her more and more each day. Whenever my phone buzzed, my heart leaped. I didn’t mind the startling lack of visual evidence that she was the woman in the white suit. Sure, she told me videos wouldn’t play on her phone, but I could hear it occasionally buzzing, and birds occasionally beatboxing in the background, when we spoke. We were going to be together. That was all that mattered.  

So deep was her commitment to me, our commitment to each other, that she not only vowed to find a job in Columbus (she sent me a screenshot of a job posting at Wexner Medical Center she intended to apply for), she also turned down an offer of a salary increase to stay at NYMC that was more than what I make in a year. She’d even found a house of us to live in and made plans to take her citizenship oath in Cleveland during the weekend of February 19th. I made sure to schedule that weekend off (who knew how much sleep we’d be getting) and introduce her to my mother. 

Before any of that could happen, we had to meet for the first time. We made plans to finally connect in person over the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend. She’d even found us a house in Victorian Village (a four-bedroom palace by my standards) that had been built in 1900. She’d pay cash for it of course, and we’d figure out a way to pay off my lease so we could live together. She’d be a doctor and I could quit my job at the bank for a career in freelance copywriting. In the evenings, we’d alternate between dancing the tango and chasing each other throughout the house in various states of undress. 

After years of false starts and failures with the opposite sex, my ship was finally coming in. 

                                                       ***

Somehow, Kristina managed to schedule her job interview at Wexner Medical Center and a showing of the house on the same day. I couldn’t be with her since I couldn’t get time away from work on such short notice, but she messaged me once she was back in New York saying that the interview had gone well. They’d agreed to let her have a month off (she suggested we vacation in Hawaii during that time). Her first day would be February 24th, which would line up nicely with what I’d planned to be my last day at the bank, March 1st.

She also said she had a new set of keys in her hand. The wire transfer to purchase the house (list price: $539,000.00) had gone through without a hitch. I’d made sure to have Kristina confirm the wiring instructions verbally with the recipient before sending the money. I didn’t want the woman I loved to be scammed. The house was hers free and clear. She could have both something she wanted (a pool, for only $20,000.00) and something she didn’t (a mortgage).

I was as over the moon as a reserved yet intensely passionate person can be. 

In a not so simple twist of fate, Kristina called me the morning from New York. There had been an accident. 

Garry had called to say that Richard had been driving in Red Hill (a suburb of Perth) when another driver, who’d gone fishing for their fallen cell phone, rear-ended him. The guy who caused the accident wasn’t seriously injured. Richard, on the other hand, had a broken leg and a collapsed lung. She’d be leaving New York for Perth that night, with a layover in Dubai (another potential vacation destination we’d discussed).

“Do you want to come to Australia with me?” She asked.

Kristina was willing to call Emirates and book tickets for both of us. She wanted to check with me first. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was fast approaching, but Australia wasn’t a continent I could visit over a three-day weekend. Kristina was disappointed yet understanding. The boxes she’d packed in preparation for her move to Columbus would have to spend several New York minutes in solitude while she traveled to be with her brothers, Richard’s wife Michelle, her niece Bianca (who was the same age as my niece), and the rest of her family. My heart didn’t quite break for her, but cracks appeared. Both of her parents were deceased, now her twin was clinging to life. How much more unlucky could she be?

                                                       ***

I was sad that I couldn’t see her, but our plans were becoming more specific with each passing day, almost scarily so. There was no question that they were worth waiting for. I’d waited 38 years for Kristina, what was another 10 days?

We’d talked about getting married in our new house, in front of a small group of friends and family. Privately, I hoped my friend Matt, when he finally met Kristina, wouldn’t embarrass me too much with ill-timed disability jokes, but I was bracing myself for the inevitable on more than one front. I’d told Kristina there was no need to spend $6,000.00 on a wedding dress like she did when she’d married Stuart. Even though I had the impression that money was no object to her, I figured the biggest thing she’d be spending money on was travel expenses. Bianca had asked her auntie Kris if she could come to the wedding. Auntie Kris did not object.

We even planned on starting a family. Kristina said she’d been met with surprise from a fellow doctor when she approached them about having a Mirena (inserted into her uterus to guard against pregnancy. I supported her decision and remembered how she’d told me she didn’t like condoms as she reminded herself to breathe during our sexually-charged WWF chat sessions. As far as I was concerned, her body was exactly that. It wasn’t my place to tell her what to do with it. She took it a step further, however, as only she could. 

If she had the Mirena removed after a year, would I be opposed to having a child? Of course not, I said. Her voice nearly cracked with joy. I could almost feel the tears running down her face. She’d later tell me of a dream she had in which she was breastfeeding our son, Alexander David when he wrapped his hand around my index finger as I passed by.  

Her reaction to our agreement to have a child was as extreme as her dreamy description of breastfeeding, but I didn’t chide her for it. Not my place. After all, it wasn’t the first time she displayed a penchant for the outliers of affection. She loved to send me YouTube videos others had made of love letters to their one and only. You know, the ones where the letters of each word come across the screen one-by-one, with some incredibly cheesy song playing in the background. She sent me a clip of a couple dancing the tango (of course), and the official music video for How Do I Live by LeAnn Rimes, yet another way of reminding herself to breathe. 

Though I loved her no less, I sent her only two videos. One was the Raymond K. Hessel scene from the movie Fight Club, in which Tyler Durden challenges Raymond to begin living his life according to his dreams instead of quitting whenever things got too hard. I told Kristina that I tried to live (though I didn’t always succeed) with the same sense of urgency Raymond displayed as he left his apathy behind and ran down the street toward the best-tasting breakfast of his life. Kristina said the scene was scary, and I was nothing like Raymond. She always seemed to know the right thing to say. 

The second video was a performance of Nature Boy by Nat King Cole. I’d come to admire the song because I’d heard it many times through the years on my favorite Serbian radio program, Peščanik. Nature Boy had always reminded me of the hundreds if not thousands of hours I’d spent listening to Peščanik to improve my language skills and knowledge of current affairs in the former Yugoslavia. Now, the lyrics had another layer of meaning:

There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy They say he wandered very far, very far Over land and sea A little shy and sad of eye But very wise was he

And then one day A magic day he passed my way And while we spoke of many things Fools and kings This he said to me The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return

The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return

Like I said, what was another ten days?

                                                       ***

The situation on the ground was worse than anticipated by the time Kristina arrived in Perth. Richard’s lung hadn’t just collapsed, it had been punctured. There was a serious question of whether he’d be able to breathe on his own. Kristina said the driver who caused the accident had been arrested and charged with manslaughter. If that wasn’t enough, she’d had a tense encounter with his sister when she came to the hospital to check on Richard. 

As the only medical professional among the five siblings, Kristina had been given the unenviable task of deciding whether to keep Richard on life support or give him a chance to breathe on his own. Even though we were on opposite sides of the globe and dealing with a thirteen-hour time difference, it was hard for me to focus at work. I was constantly checking my phone while at my desk at work, whether I’d heard the buzz of an incoming message or not. My heart raced every time I opened my phone case to illuminate the screen. Getting caught looking at my phone on the production floor could have meant a serious rebuke from management if the wrong person caught me on the wrong day. 

I didn’t give a shit. 

Someone I loved was hurting. I knew where my priorities were. I knew I would only be with the bank a short while longer (even if no one else did) before Kristina and I started our life together. The last eight years wouldn’t be easy to brush aside. Still, the chance to live in a beautiful house with a beautiful woman, and pursue a copywriting career seemed too good to pass up. I was willing to trade the certainty of the present for my dreams of an uncertain future. Tyler Durden gave Raymond K. Hessel six weeks to get on his way to becoming a veterinarian. If he didn’t, Tyler said, Raymond would be dead. In the real world, March 1st was almost exactly six weeks away. 

I’d need no such warning; I’d gotten this far by not heeding warnings.

The next morning (Ohio time), Kristina called me and said Richard had squeezed her hand while she sat beside him in his hospital room, but there was still a long road to recovery ahead. I was no medical professional like Kristina, but I was hopeful this was a positive sign. I didn’t know the man, but I’d looked forward to meeting him ever since Kristina said Richard would be stopping to visit us in our new house after taking care of business in California. She spoke so lovingly of him. I’d always heard twins had a special bond. They were no exception.

She spoke lovingly of me to her brothers too. Kristina said they had come to believe that I must be a hell of a guy if I could make their sister feel the way I did by knocking down the defenses so firmly-entrenched around her heart. She said that in her brothers’ eyes, I’d come a long way from being just a random person she’d met playing a game (a game!) on her phone; someone who could have been a rapist. Kristina made me feel like I was becoming part of their family.

The next morning, I woke to a heart-wrenching message from Kristina. Richard hadn’t been able to breathe on his own and had died as a result of his injuries. Kristina agonized over having made what she said was the wrong decision. I did the best I could to console her from half a world away. I’m not sure how much help I was, but my heart was with her even though I couldn’t be. The time and distance between us meant we couldn’t be together to mourn Richard’s death and celebrate his life. As much as it hurt for us not to be together. Kristina did have one request of me, a request I was happy to oblige: She asked me to pick. the flowers for Richard’s funeral the following Thursday. 

I chose pink roses because I felt they were unique. I’d never heard of a funeral with pink roses before. After I’d communicated my decision, Kristina sent me an image of a pink rose, saying she’d bought 300 of them. She promised to make sure everyone knew they were my contribution to the occasion. Since she’d be giving Richard’s eulogy, she’d have ample opportunity to do so.

About two days before the funeral she called me saying that that they’d had a least a hundred people at what had been her childhood home to celebrate Richard. Her father had sold some of the properties the family owned before he died, but her brother Michael still lived in what had been Kristina’s childhood home. Michael suggested Kristina take one of their father’s cigar boxes as a memento, but she was content to leave it where it was. 

She took the same approach to her childhood bedroom, which she’d left largely untouched since moving out years ago. Amazingly, she still had a doll of Gizmo from Gremlins, which her father had taken her to see in what probably felt like another lifetime. I admired how she managed to look back at her past and forward to our future. Her family wanted her to stay longer than she’d planned after the funeral, but they understood how much she just wanted to be with me. It seemed “I just want to be with you” was a phrase she repeated every chance she got. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the same way. 

                                                       ***

Kristina called the morning of Richard’s funeral (Australia time) understandably a mess. She and Michelle were about to head over to the church. She said she didn’t know how she was going to make it through without me. I offered the best encouragement I could, told her I loved her (I did), and asked her to be strong. I spent the entirety of my shift  at work that day physically in the Buckeye State, but mentally in the Land Down Under. Kristina said she’d try to get in touch with the guys who were supposed to drive her stuff from New York and see if they could meet her in Columbus. We knew she’d be exhausted if she had to drive to Ohio almost immediately after spending 30 hours (she’d gotten a hotel room for the six hours she’d be spending in Dubai) in transit from Western Australia, but it was a price we were willing to pay.

What was waiting for another four days to be together compared to the rest of our lives?

Kristina called me the next morning to say that she almost didn’t make it through Richard’s eulogy. She had to be emotionally and physically supported by her brothers as she bid farewell to her twin. She said she thought about me as she spoke, and she’d gotten a lot of compliments about the pink roses. 

She also gave me the impression that it’s customary for people to speak out at funerals in Australia. Her boisterous cousin Anthony, who asked Kristina to “Show us your tits!” a few days earlier (in reference to when she was 16 and  her bikini top came off at a swimming pool), wanted to know all about her plans with her “Yankee man” in the middle of the service. I couldn’t help wondering if Kristina had told everyone about our agreement: her bikini top would be entirely unnecessary whenever we were in the water together. I knew those inquiring Aussie minds were so far away from me that our toilet water didn’t even flow in the same direction when flushed, but my face turned as red as the bikini bottom I’d imagined Kristina wearing as we kissed, buoyant beneath the moonlight of the hot Australian summer, her top long ago discarded, floating unattended and aimless on the other side of the pool. 

By Friday, Kristina was in the air, and I was making final preparations for her arrival. After the false start of Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, I was convinced nothing was going to stop us this time. She’d already worked her final shift at NYMC, and said her toughest goodbyes. Among these was Simon, an eight-year-old with Leukemia who was not long for this world. I’d told Kristina I had a Buckeye necklace she could give to him as a way to both remember her and think of her new life in Ohio. Still, she’d placed serious doubt in my mind as to whether or not he’d live long enough to wear it.  At that moment, I’d thought of a quote I’d attributed to Athletic Shorts, a collection of short stories by Chris Crutcher, who I’d met at the American Corner in Novi Sad years ago:

If you want to make life important, shorten it. 

I’d always liked that one, even if I hadn’t always lived by it. Kristina and I were about to leave our pasts behind and live fully in the now, however exciting, intoxicating and scary it may have been. The pillow on the left side of my bed, the one she’d chosen, wouldn’t be empty much longer. I had Monday, January 27th off, and hoped to need it after a weekend of little sleep.

                                                       ***

On Saturday, I made a trip to TJ Maxx. I was looking for a new pair of jeans to wear when I saw Kristina for the first time. As excited as I was, I hadn’t shared in her wealth yet, so I still didn’t want to break the bank. I chose a dark wash that I could wear with anything. I was feeling good about myself when I remembered something I’d learned in Serbia that had nothing to do with athletic shorts: You should never show up at someone’s house for the first time empty-handed. 

I already had a cutting board shaped like the state of Ohio that I’d bought at the same place I got the bathmats. I thought it was such a unique idea because it served two purposes. One was in the kitchen, the other was in geography. It was supposed to a a cool way to introduce Kristina to the what, where and when of my home state.

Fresh jeans around my left forearm, I almost got in the checkout line. I was inches from crossing the point-of-no-return barrier that separated the checkout line from the rest of the store when a horrible thought occurred to me. I needed to bring Kristina something to eat. I turned around a ventured into a section of TJ Maxx unspoiled by humans. There was no one around me for ten feet in any direction. Intentionally or not, I was practicing social distancing in a pre-Coronavirus lockdown world. 

I saw it when I found a few shelves of snacks, oddly placed there in its box between some graham crackers and a jar of Nutella. It might as well have been a resident of the Island of Misfit Toys, or a sickly puppy from a shelter that nobody wanted because you couldn’t say for certain whether or not it’d be dead in three weeks. In other words, it was exactly what I wanted, what I needed: baklava.

Who the fuck buys baklava at TJ Maxx?

                                                       ***

I didn’t notice the small details of my new jeans  until I got them home. The phrase LUCKY YOU was sown on the placket (a word worth 18 points in WWF) were sown on the placket. There was also a small piece of paper the looked like a fortune from a fortune cookie in one of the pockets. It read: Today is the first day of one wild ride. Lucky # 10, 23, 30, 35, 59, 11. “Kristina is going to love this,” I thought.

Late Saturday night, Kristina messaged me saying she was back at her duplex in New York. Her crystal was all boxed up and her co-workers were running out of time to interrupt our conversations by knocking on her door and begging her to stay. Two guys would be there to start the trip to Columbus with her at 10 A.M. Sunday morning. She’d had to pay extra for them to work on Sunday, but who cared? I didn’t. She certainly didn’t. Money can do lots of things when it’s no object.

The only catch was that one of the guys didn’t have a Driver's License, so Kristina would have to drive her black Ford Focus while the two guys manned the truck. The guys were slow at loading Kristina’s things onto the truck, so they were behind schedule by the time all three hit the road, but Kristina was on her way to me nonetheless. 

I’d message her about every two hours to see how far along they were. I paced nervously around my apartment all day because I couldn’t hold a thought in my head. All I wanted to do was step out from behind my phone’s keypad and ravish Kristina in real life. She was so close I could almost taste her.  

I’d thrown caution to the wind a long time ago, but I still had some lingering doubts. Like I said, we’d never video chatted, so I’d never seen her face when she wasn’t posing for a picture. I couldn’t find her anywhere on social media. Reason, aka the voice in my (big) head that screamed “Abort! Abort!” had passed out drunk for the last time after too many nights of partying with his false friends Raw, Dick, and Imagination.

                                                       ***

If anything, the huge plot holes in our love story made my attraction to Kristina even stronger. In my mind’s eye, I saw this woman I had never met as the anthesis of the look-at-me/outrage/cancel culture that screams the loudest in America today. Kristina was the opposite of my oops-my-pussy-is-showing roommate Dragana from Enter the Dragana. We talked about books and fitness instead of counting followers and likes. Kristina had even signed up to volunteer with me at a tennis clinic for kids with Down’s Syndrome. I knew then that her heart was as big as her wallet. 

She didn’t need the attention that Dragana craved. At the very beginning of our connection, Kristina had asked me if I had any other women in my life. I asked her the same question about other men. We both answered no. She said my lack of other women was a good thing; the only things she didn’t like sharing were her men and her chocolate.

 Somehow, I managed to get a bit of sleep Sunday night, but it came only after I read that Kristina had arrived safely in Columbus. The movers had even helped her unload her car.  

Monday morning, I messaged Kristina asking how she was feeling after spending the night in our new house. She replied that she’d woken up in the middle of the night and didn’t know where she was. 

After everything she’d been through in the past two weeks, who could blame her?

As I had the day before when she was traveling, I messaged her about once every two hours to see how she was doing. I didn’t want to come across as needy, but I couldn’t help myself. I thought I’d found love, something I’d convinced myself didn’t exist. I wanted to dance the tango with Kristina and promptly rip the red thigh-high slit dress, gorilla costume, or whatever she was wearing off of her. I was convinced she wanted the same and nothing was going to stop us. 

                                                       ***

As hours passed without a message from Kristina, the fears I’d hidden away, buried, or just flat-out ignored from the moment she said said, “Hello David” came creeping back.  Around 3:30 that afternoon, I knew I had to do something. I had to know the truth. I requested a Lyft and entered as my destination the address where my new life was supposed to begin. I put on my new jeans, placed the baklava in a reusable shopping bag with the Ohio-shaped cutting board, and waited.

Five-star Jeff came pretty quickly. We talked about what we both did outside the car as we made our way down to the house. Twenty minutes felt like all the games Kristina and I had played, plus the two months we’d spent talking, all rolled into one. 

I lied to Jeff for no reason other than it was easy; I told him the contents of my shopping bag were housewarming gifts for friends of mine who were new in town. “Yeah. She’ll be starting a job at Wexner Medical Center next month. They gave her a month off to acclimate herself to her new surroundings. Can you believe that shit?”

I noticed something odd when we pulled up to the house, but I lied again and had Jeff pull over to wait for me in case they weren’t home, even though I instantly knew they wouldn’t be.

A burgundy-colored For Sale sign was still in the front yard.   

I silently cursed myself for not having listened to the less-hornier angels of my nature. I felt like I was going to vomit burgundy-colored blood all over five-star Jeff’s floorboards. I liked Jeff, but I couldn’t let him know how badly I’d been played, or all that had led up to what he’d just witnessed. I needed to get home before I could even think of letting my feelings show. At that moment, Jeff was the only other human being on the planet who knew where I was, even if I’d lied about why he’d taken me there. 

I walked up the steps and sheepishly knocked on the door. Ringing the doorbell would have been much easier, but my stomach was doing somersaults. I fully expected a classic fat-chick catfish reveal like so many I’d seen on television, but there was no moment of truth, no dramatic confrontation. After five minutes of tense anticipation that quickly morphed into oh-shit-what-if-someone-really-lives-here paranoia, I went back to Jeff’s SUV and explained that they must not be home, so I’d like to go back to mine. 

After Jeff dropped me off at my place, I messaged Kristina that I needed to talk to her and it was important. I made sure to include two of the kissy-face emojis that had become ubiquitous in our exchanges.  As many times as I tried to send the message, the reply was always the same: Sending failed... tap to retry. I knew I’d been had, but the enormity of both what she’d done to me, and what I’d allowed her to do, didn’t really hit me until I emailed her in a last-ditch effort to tell her something she already knew: I couldn’t reach her through our chat. After I hit send, I finally let my heart sink among the crashing waves of anger, sadness, regret, and self-loathing that had been battering it all day.  

David played “why” for ten points. 

The pillow on the left side of my bed is still empty when I wake up in the morning. Instead of a four-bedroom house, I still live in my one-bedroom apartment. The walls are so thin that I once heard one of the two homosexuals who live adjacent to me tell someone on the other end of the phone that they could tolerate lemon pepper seasoning in their food if they didn’t know it was there, but foreknowledge of its presence was a deal-breaker.

The things you do for love. 

It may not be a reality dreams are made of, but at least its real, and it’s mine.