I wore his shirt – crisp and fresh from the laundry basket as I hung my own rain-soaked clothes to dry.  The conversation was sparse but the air was gravid with an intangible emotion.  By the end of the day, we had not touched once and he saw me off at the door, wearing my own clothes again.

He was merely an acquaintance but years after that moment he still represents the most romantic day of my life.  Those who know me know that I have trouble accepting traditional notions of romance and the labeling of anything as “romantic” is kind of a big deal for me.  Guys I’ve dated can tell you that I have wrinkled my nose at their many attempts to be romantic.  Guys I’ve dated can also tell you that my response to the first “I love you” is usually shoving something in my mouth that takes a really long time to chew.  It’s something that I’ve always felt really bad about – especially as a writer.  Falling in love is such a common theme in storytelling that the Anti-Romantic can really feel left out.

Over coffee with a friend earlier this week, we discussed the impracticality and inconvenience of falling in love.  Science has found falling in love akin to mental illness so… yikes – what do I need that for? My friend and I conceded to the fact that like any common virus, lovesickness will find its way to us one day regardless of how ready we are for it.  He added that the only thing we really have to fear regarding falling in love is if it were unrequited.  Read more »

Fry finally finds the words to express himself to Leela via conversation heart

In my first semester of college, Facebook was known as The Facebook and was restricted to only a handful of universities.  It had yet to include any of the schools my friends attended and was not at all the Facebook that we know today.  There were no status updates, no photos, no wall and looking back now – I wonder how we made any use of it at all.

Because of this, my high school friends and I were forced to keep in touch via what is now kind of the old-fashioned way – mass email.  I would come home from a full day of class to find a couple new emails in my inbox and I’d sit there scrolling through them one by one.  Though I was filled with the frenetic energy that comes with that first year of freedom, these emails were soothing in its familiarity.  My high school friends were almost all writers and/or actors so they had no trouble eloquently expressing themselves with their own distinct voices.  I never really had to look at the email address or signature to know whose email I was reading.

However, there was one very extreme exception to the rule.  One of these friends (let’s call him Frank) was our token quiet kid.  Among the boisterous theatre geeks, he stood out with his reserved, buttoned-up demeanor.  Frank spoke only when spoken to and he replied with the maximum of three squeaky words at a time.  Strangely enough, Frank’s emails were solid pages of witty, lyrical compositions.  Read more »