Act natural

( Friday, Jul. 02, 2004 10:28 am )

>More bad luck

I may have a good contender for Worst Date Ever. Earlier this week I agreed to meet David for coffee (again for coffee! He's broke and really likes coffee, although the last 2 times, we've both had soda) because of his heartfelt but scarily long letter and my awareness of having behaved badly when I blew him off. So--coffee! Awkward conversation! I was observing that his face is pretty good looking, but he again was wearing a cruddy T-shirt and smelled a bit. You live two blocks away, I know you could've gone home to change your shirt, buddy. Anyway, so we sat outside and talked uncomfortably for a while about how things are going less than greatly for both of us, but mostly for him. For respite I started drawing on his newspaper, when suddenly my delayed but acute spidey sense kicked in.

"Hey, that guy just stole all my money, didn't he?" I said.
"What?" said David.

I looked down at my purse, and sure enough it was unzipped, with my wallet sitting on top. I wasn't too upset though--based on my policy of being extremely poor, I had only had $9 in cash on me, so haha to you, Mr. Pick-pocket. It had been the guy sitting behind me at the cafe. I had noticed when he bumped my chair, but thought nothing of it til about a minute later, by which time he was already gone. David jumped up alertly and started walking up the street going "what guy? What guy?" like he was going to apprehend him, which made me really nervous, like maybe I should be ready to run that guy down for nine dollars. But he was gone daddy gone. And then I checked for my ATM card. Gone likewise. Then I started to mildly freak out.

"Ohhhhh noooooo, my debit card too. I gotta go, I gotta go home and cancel it!"
"Ok, well. Okay. Are you--okay, see you."
"Do you want to come with me?" I asked, because I was panicked. But surprisingly, David didn't seem to want to continue our evening of fun.
"OK, OK, then, no, you should stay here. I gotta go home, though. I'll see you later." And I booked it home, where I cancelled my card.

Now I'm pretty much free to reflect on my stupidity in the cafe. It makes it much worse that at the time when the guy was probably stealing from me, David had just started asking me about Call, and I was deep in trying to explain how delusionally much I loved him.....

"So what did you love about him so much?"
"Well....[long pause]..everything. I even---even the horrible things about him---well, not horrible, he wasn't horrible---but even the things that were wrong with him, I knew were wrong, but I loved them too...."

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