Gaseous Love/Liquid Dignity/Solid Vengeance

rewind...

after new year's phuong was stopping by the house almost everyday, and with one man on whatever base tickling and throwing make-outs in my bedroom is, each day i was inching closer and closer to the next base, waiting for my chance to advance the eager and, by some accounts, desperate runner. she had nearly caught me with a move to first (ok, second in vietnam), that began when i passed one of my bi-weekly pathogens to her, and then her thanking me with a text message that read, "maybe if you make love to me i stronger" (to which i wittily responded "if my kisses make you sick, then i think if i make love to you i will kill you." fuckin you know it).

my pants at this point, being both metaphorically and literally around my ankles, left me practically sintactically unprepared to respond when she turned and threw a laser in the form of another text message in the direction of that suddenly debased runner: "do you love me?" ...without thinking i retreated, dove back to the base and came up safe, but now stood phased with a dirty shirt and a muddy face. then before i could get signals from the third base coach, she pulled out a pitch i hadn't seen in a long ass time: a split thumb-index finger L-bomb, the very next day face to face.

"matt, i love you."

"wow, ummm..."
strike one
"i love kissing you"
strike two
"i love, uh, being with you?"
strike three

(mat mat haaaa?)

there's only one swing that can hit that pitch and fuck it, you know what? i forgot i was a free-agent playing in a no-contract league, and when all those flashes went off expecting to capture that spectacular turning point in the game, i lost sight of the ball while looking for "love" like a little leaguer.

i'll leave both the analogy and alliteration here, and just give it to you straight. despite her being thoroughly unimpressed with my stammering, but "dignified," response to her passionately and obviously incorrect conviction, at the time i felt comfortable with my honesty, foolishly gripping my last remaining ideal with the kind of righteous arrogance that make the justifiedly jaded use quotation marks on words most people still romanticize about.

the following day, she came again to my house, this time without her phone (and perhaps a chunk of her "dignity"?), as someone had presumably stolen it (her phone that is) because how could anyone possibly lose a $500 phone? ya got me. for the sake of sequence, let's just say it was the day after that when she was again at my house, and in neither a particularly talkative mood (but when you're with someone who has a vocabulary of no more than 100 words... well, you know) nor a looking-in-my-general-direction kind of mood. granted i wasn't exactly going out of my way to see what her problem was but regardless, she and her friend got up and left without saying where they were going, and i took the opportunity to do the drunken karaoke thing with the friends i'd been neglecting for just a phuong too long. before i ended up losing my phone that night (a far less expensive coincidence for me than her), i get a message from her asking why i didn't ask her to stay when she got up to leave... errrr because i was busy saying good-bye? man do i miss having a girlfriend so that i can answer these kinds of questions.

next thing i know, it's saturday morning and she ain't got a phone, and i ain't got a phone or a clue how i'm gonna get in touch with her. oh wait, i know where she works and her friends' numbers. meh, no rush. i'm sure she'll find a way to get in touch with me.

...

fast forward to today, the first time we've hung out in almost 4 weeks. love or rather its lucid veil has evaporated, and though i've temporarily sacrificed my dignity, a pride that rises and falls with the tide, i feel that what i've gained, an opportunity at ultimate revenge, is most definitely worth the weight of its hefty reality in gold.