When I wasn’t busy getting gum stuck in my hair freshman year, I was sort of casually dating someone from back home, Amos. We met through mutual friends and I was immediately into him because he was well-spoken and insightful while maintaining killer abs. These are important qualities to 18-year-old females. I bummed rides back home several times in the fall semester, and we would hang out with or without my friends (one cuddly movie-watching experience got crashed by two of my guy friends). He even came to visit me during fall break (again, with friends).
I was a tad intimidated by the age difference (he was 4 years older) and otherwise still shaken by my disastrous rebound from Junior (thanks, Ginger), so we kept our clothes on. By Winter Break, my interest was waning, and I spent New Year’s party-hopping around my hometown with my best friend. We stopped by a party with that group of friends, and Amos and I didn’t share a New Year’s Kiss (if only I had known then that my future romantic NYE experiences would be either full of foreshadowing or generally ridiculous). We generally talked online less and less after I returned to college, until February 12.
I was about to leave my dorm room to enjoy some grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner with my friends when he IM’ed me (this was a time of AOL Instant Messenger, pre-gchat or facebook chat or whatever college kids use these days). This wasn’t a casual, pointless conversation that I could easily brush off; he wanted to have a dating post-mortem. I was stuck. My roommate waited for a while, but then she had to move on with the group. He included such gems as “I think you liked dating me because of the distance, both physical and emotional.” For someone who I hadn’t seen naked, this seemed a bit heavy. I held it together in the hopes that we would let me go if I listened politely for long enough. After what seemed like an eternity, I said goodbye, signed off, and high-tailed it to the dining hall. If you know me, you know not to come between me and food. You also know not to put your feet on my bed if your shoes are still on, but that’s a story for later in the year.
