Alright, I guess I promised to write something about what happened with Mr. Long Distance. Not that I imagine you all are checking in every day hoping that it's been posted, but I guess I promised myself more than anyone. I supposed I need to air this out before I forget the facts entirely. For a while I was really pissed off about the whole situation. Whoever said anger is unhealthy is full of it. It's been my experience that anger makes for more interesting writing. But tonight I'm just depressed about it. So I apologize if this is boring, weepy, and melodramatic. But anyway, here goes.
Mr. Long Distance and I met a few years ago, via the internet of all things. I started this group that wrote letters to our Colorado senators about the civil war in Uganda, asking them to help end it. I used a list of people that went to an event Invisible Children had in Denver to send out Myspace messages about the group, LD was one of them. He ended up adding me as a friend on myspace. I remember thinking he was way cute but that he had a girlfriend. "Oh well," I thought. "He lives in South Dakota any way, what exactly did I think was going to happen?" Flash forward a few months and he added me on facebook, still with the girlfriend I think. We never really talked but I added him anyway (I usually reserve facebook for people I actually know, his good looks must've made him the exception).
About a year went by (I may be royally making up this time line, but it's the best I can remember) and a boy I had been positively in love with (unrequited) had officially told me to screw off, my grandfather had died, and I started in on my quarter life crisis. I was in a pretty dark place. You can go back to my old old posts and see they're quite depressing. He would send me kind comments telling me I'm wonderful and to hang in there. It felt really nice to have a complete stranger in my corner when it seemed no one else was.
And then on a Sunday morning in April, I was sitting on my friend's porch swing, eating a saltine and drinking a sprite, trying to get rid of a hang over. I received a text message from facebook saying I had a message. It was LD saying he was going to be in town in a few weeks for a wedding and would I go with him. I may or may not have still been slightly drunk when I agreed to go with him, but the email was sent and I had two weeks to freak out over the whole situation. I finally met him the day before the wedding at a park with some his friends. My friend Gia came with me. They were all playing soccer and frisbee. Gia and I don't play anything that resembles a sport, especially with complete strangers. The whole situation was incredibly awkward and I couldn't wait to leave. I even made up some phony excuse as to why I couldn't go to sushi with them afterwards.
The next day was the wedding. He and his brother came to pick me up, about 20 minutes early, which meant no make up and wet hair. Awesome. He didn't seem to mind though and told me I looked beautiful. I hadn't really thought about it being a romantic date until then and I started to get really nervous. We got to the wedding and I was introduced to his friends who hardly talked to me. The ceremony was almost done when someone made the announcement asking that we stick to the seating chart. I leaned over to LD and said "Did you RSVP for me?" He leaned back and said "No but I talked to the groom about it yesterday. He's totally cool with it." Men obviously don't understand catering bills and seating charts.
During the reception I coward behind a corner while he asked the mother of the bride for another chair and place setting. I was terrified. You know how mothers of the bride can get. And she had reason to be mad. I wasn't the only crasher. Some other friends of the groom decided to show up unannounced as well. Our table was crowded, I'll leave it at that. Despite the amount of people at our table, conversation (for me anyway) was in short supply, something that would happen time and time again as our relationship progressed. But I'll talk more about that later. To tope it off, there was no dancing, no music other than the father of the groom playing the accordion and no alcohol. Yes, I crashed a dry wedding. FML.
I have a small anxiety problem. And by small, I mean most social situation make me short of breath. This particular social situation brought on a full fledged anxiety attack. Luckily I'm pretty good at hiding them and managed to get through the night. It was just so incredibly awkward. LD made pretty good conversation, but he was also there to be with his friends, so a good chunk of the night was spent trying to get someone to talk to me for more than a couple of minutes, and failing miserably. I finally gave up and sat in silence for a while, until it was time to go. LD invited me to go with him to his friends house. When I asked what they'd be doing he said "probably sit around, drink a little and play some music." Sounds like a decent time, if the people involved were at all friendly and open to new people. But, since they weren't any of those things, I made up a story about offending someone for not going to party and needing to leave. Gia was my saviour that night. When she showed up it was like all of that anxiety finally was diffused. Finally someone I knew, liked, and was willing to talk to me.
After I left LD that night, Gia and I went to a party with some friends. Ironically that was the night I started a relationship with a guy I had been interested in for about a month. That makes me sound like a total whore, but I honestly never really thought of the wedding as a romantic date. LD did send me an email later though asking if we could go on a date the next time he was in town. I told him to call me and "we'll take it from there." Essentially our entire relationship, romantic and otherwise, has been built on bad timing.
You're probably wondering why I ended up dating this guy when I had such an awful time with him. The truth is it was his friends more than anything. He was wonderful. He was accommodating and nice and I felt really comfortable around HIM. His friends were a different story. For the next year we would get together every once in a while when he was in town, just he and I, and it was great. We were both into activism and music, he made me laugh, and I liked the way he looked at me. I'm beginning to think that I'm much easier to get a long with the less you know about me. It's like the closer I get with people (with a few exceptions) the less we like each other.
So, when my boyfriend and I broke up a few months before my sister's wedding, I had to call in a favor to a boy in South Dakota. And that's when the real story begins. But it's late, and this has been enough of a trip down shitty memory lane.
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