Spare Change

He was a terrible kisser.

I mean, like, beyond bad. I'm 31 and I've kissed a lot of frogs, but this one was toad in the tongue department. What, exactly was he trying to do with that thing?

I thought this the entire 11 hours we kissed. Well, it felt like 11 hours. It was probably a minute or two - a minute or two too much. Although I liked Surfer Dude, I wasn't sure if I could really teach a 37-year-old dog new tricks.

But when he dumped me, my heart and my tongue were crushed. "What? No more make-out sessions?" I thought.

So let's just get something straight: I'm terrible when it comes to change. What I mean is, when it comes to men, I seem to change everything about them in my head. I make them up. Here they are, live in front of me, yet I'm dreaming about a totally different man. I'm creating a fantasy.

I've done this with the last few relationships I've been in. To start, they weren't even relationships, so this alone is the first mistake I make. I create more than there really is.

The second mistake comes from the fact that I change them from emotionally barren, inattentive jerks to lovable, passionate and kind images of perfection. So when they lose interest or go away, I become devastated - the way you'd feel as if someone ripped off your left arm. That's how I'd imagine it feels to lose your soul mate and in my mind, that's exactly what I lost.

But really, I lost the fantasy. The poetic, sensitive Mr. Corkscrew really wasn't all those things. What he was, was a lust-filled Harvard man who knew his way around words almost as well as he knew his way around the curves of my body in the darkness of his bedroom. And The Mad Scientist never promised me a committed relationship. But he did buy an Amtrak ticket and a box of chocolates on his trip to KC, which I mistook for something serious. To me, chocolate is serious.

And although Surfer Dude enjoyed learning yoga, gave me 20-minute massages (that were terribly inferior, but I somehow wax poetically about now) and paid for two barf-worthy dinners out, that's all he gave me. That, and a really bad gag reflex. But here I was, for weeks, lamenting my sorry state for losing him. "He was perfect," I heard myself telling friends. "We shared the same fundamental views."

But little else. That's the thing. I changed his story in my head because it looks so much prettier.

I've finally realized just how much I love writing stories. I write my own all the time. I'll spare you the fictional version next time. And spare myself a lifetime of unnecessary editing.