february 13th
Today marks twenty years since he called for the first time.
For weeks, he had pestered me to give him my number. Yes he was attractive, and seemed nice enough, but I was coming off a string of particularly bad dating choices that fall.
There was Eddie, who, in restrospect, I’d barely liked. He wouldn’t shut up about how he was friends with the guys from Jimmy Eat World, a band I didn’t even listen to. It got so bad that my friends started calling him Eddie Eat World. There was Nick, who, dated a 17 year old immediately after we parted ways. Craig, who was incredibly kind, but also incredibly boring and far too serious. I’d spent all of two weekends with him before he called me on NYE to tell me he was in love with me. While I assured Craig that he wasn't, he remained persistent, leaving several creepy voicemails before finally backing off. Then there was Christian, who I had genuinely liked, but he broke things off to go back to his ex-girlfriend.
That left me with Jason, an aspiring jazz drummer in Austin. Whereas this new potential interest seemed like a settle-down-with kind of guy, Jason was meant to be something dumb and fun with a built-in expiration date. He was moving to Brooklyn over the summer to study at The New School under Joe Chambers. I wasn’t ready to be in a settle-down kind of situation, so Jason it was.
My best friend was finishing up her undergrad at UT and lived in a large house off campus with several other girls. It was a great place to crash in while in Austin, something I took full advantage of regularly back when I could fill up my little Mazda for $.90 a gallon and spend less than $40 the whole weekend if I played things right. The plan was to crash at Molly’s but spend most of my weekend with Jason.
On Friday night I met up with Jason at some very Austin hipster dive bar and what transpired was one of the worst dates of my life. How had I never realized how truly insufferable he was? When he wasn’t blatantly ignoring me, he was speaking at length about how he was a ‘true feminist’ because his ex had been a sex worker, and he was okay with that. (My issue wasn’t that his ex was a sex worker. My issue was his performative feminism.) He was also, clearly, still hung up on her.
Maybe dumb and fun was overrated. It hadn’t served me well yet.
I spent the remainder of the weekend doing whatever we did back then – going to bars or parties, hanging out with Molly’s roommates. On Sunday morning I logged into MySpace (ha!) and finally agreed to give this Cory guy my phone number.
He called on Friday, the night before Valentine’s Day. I’d made plans with friends, but they fell through due to inclement weather. I settled in for an evening alone, drinking the wine meant to be shared with others. By the time he called I was fully drunk, something I don’t think he was aware of until I told him a couple of years later. Somehow, in the course of the evening, I broke a chair and knocked over a cyclamen. Still, we talked for six hours and made plans for him to come visit the following weekend. He was so damn easy to talk to. I’ve always been terribly self-conscious, but never so with him.
We talked every night for the rest of that week. The following weekend he drove down from Tulsa, stayed with mutual friends, and we spent our Saturday together. And, well, here we are twenty years later.
He was, indeed, a settle-down-with kind of guy.
(For the record, I spent that Valentine’s Day with the worst hangover of my life. I was the closing manager at work, had to drive on ice, which I hate, and my mother had gifted me a humidifier. Do you know how demoralizing it is to receive a humidifier for Valentine’s Day as a single woman? The answer is ‘very’.)
9:55 p.m. - 2024-02-13