How’s your shelter-in-place? I’m doing okay now that
the Pelosi money started coming in. Sweetie and I considered moving her into my
apartment for quarantine, but I’m so, SO glad we decided to be a quarantine
household while still in separate apartments—our wonderful, wonderful separate
apartments.
To explain how I got to Quarantine Crush, we have to
go back twenty years. Why not?! Time means nothing anymore. In 1999, when I was
twenty-four, I left Small East Coast City to go to art school in Fancy Southern
California Beach Town. I chose to go to school there because a. I wanted to go
to California and b. The name of the town sounded pretty.
Obviously, this person becomes a poet. I was half-assedly
taking my art classes, pining for my newly-ex girlfriend back east, working in
a dress shop in true rom-com style, and walking a bajillion miles of canyon and
beach. One morning when I was crying in the campus courtyard because I missed
the ex, a guy I thought was cute invited me to a poetry reading, and that was that
for like the next ten years of my life. (Wouldn’t it be awesome if the art
school guy was Quarantine Crush? He isn’t, even I’M not that much of a
rom-com.)
Southern California was the place where I felt both
most alien and most welcome. The poets were almost instantly one of the Friends-style
families I’d been collecting for the entire Nineties. We spent Christmas and New Years together,
like it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t have a car! In
Southern California! How did I do anything? Poets! They drove me everywhere,
which is really, really saying something in a place where every single
thing is at least forty-five minutes away. My mind is absolutely dazzled by the
sheer number of hours my friends spent shuttling me back and forth to readings,
despite the fact that I never gave them gas money (I never, never, had any
money ever) and I sometimes forgot (or just didn’t know) my freeway exit, and my
personality was a complete nightmare, I’m sure.
But still! They drove me and drove me and DROVE me and
that strikes me as such an act of unquestioning, unconditional friendship love
that I really wish the Sex Tardis were up and running so that I could take it
on a little platonic stopoff at the millennium to be more grateful.
Quarantine Crush only crystalized as a deep sort of one-that-got-away-situation
after a few years of pressing like on his gorgeous nature photos on Instagram,
but in retrospect, I can’t help asking my younger self WHY DID YOU NOT KISS
THIS PERSON? Right up there with the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, he’s in
contention for The Actual Best Guy. Let’s add a “so far” so I don’t get the
blues.
I’m not even sure if I knew him before the day I leapt
into his arms. We were competing in a Slam Championship. His voice was (and
still is) such a ravenous, glorious bluster. When he finished his poem I didn’t
stop to think, I didn’t wonder if it made sense, I just jumped, and he held me
without difficulty, and theatrically carried me out the door.
Of course shelter-in-place and too many corona
feelings and counting the hand wash seconds would make me hanker for some
leaping, to see what kind of advice me-in-my-twenties might have. The results
were…mixed, but decidedly THE BEST.
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