Inside Out

My outfit looked a little something like this: dingy grey tank top over a pair of my grandpa’s oversized blue and white checkered pajama pants. Five minutes into his visit I got hot and changed into Mickey Mouse boxer shorts and a pair of grungy white socks (my feet were cold).

My hair, which hadn’t been washed in three days, was sticking to my head, I wore no makeup and my body smelled faintly of celery. I was a walking PMS commercial — bloated, unshaven and overly self-conscious — but he was completely unfazed. His smile was as wide as the first day I’d met him six years ago, which he later told me was the moment he knew he was going to love me. I could have been wearing a little black dress and fishnets and his reaction would’ve been the same.

He wasn’t here for high fashion or good hygiene. He was here for me.

Me.

“You have always excited me,” he said, as he ran his hands down my stubbly legs. “Everyone in my life knows how I feel about you.”

I guess I did now, as I was at my least polished but in his presence managed to feel as if I was at my dazzling best.

This was foreign territory. I’d forgotten how it feels to be seen on the inside and liked for that person. No bells and whistles. No beach bronzed skin or sexy legs. No waxed body parts or coiffed hair.

Could it be that he values my sense of humor more than my ass? Are my morals more important to him than a blowjob?

Everything in me is pointing to yes. To him, who I am matters.

Me.

We are curled up, like human balls of yarn, on the couch, and I tell him I never thought we’d be sitting here, all giddy and smitten, six years after we first met (and I dumped him).

“I always hoped we would,” he smiled. “I knew you’d see things my way.”

That would be nice. His vision is much better than mine.

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Better Than Pasta

Italian butts. Enough said.

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The Best Street to Find Yourself On

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Thank You For Breaking My Heart

I don’t know how to do it. How to say it. I don’t know if I can scream it loudly enough. My lungs aren’t that strong.

But without a voice, how can you tell someone it hurts? How can you shout the pain, through your skin and your teeth and every strand of hair on your head? How do you say “ouch” in a way that means more than a paper cut or a bruise? How do you tell a man he broke your heart?

I’m not exactly sure, and I make my living from my words. I simply can’t comprehend the gravity of the human heart, least of all my own. It throbs inside me sometimes, so heavy and loud I can hear it in my earlobes. Only a few times did it strangle the voice inside my head with its tremendous pain.

Like when my boyfriend of four years called me at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday to tell me he was leaving me for a woman he met three days earlier. The chill in his voice. The deafening shrill “goodbye” makes when someone you love whispers it in your ear.

Or when Beer Man, who had me floating on a cloud made of hops and bubblegum, told me, with a quivering voice, “It wasn’t me, it was him,” and that he could only give me 50% and I deserved 100% (where do men get these crazy figures from?), the smiles that had been making my jaws ache slowly turned into a gelatinous puddle of despair.

Perhaps the worst, though, was when The Mad Scientist told me he didn’t want what I wanted. I found it all funny, considering what I wanted was relatively simple and not much trouble at all. I just wanted him to love me. I wanted him to say, “I have no clue how this is going to work. You live there and I live here and you believe in universal truths, and I spend my life trying to prove our existence on this planet with scientific data, but hey, let’s give it a go. For the first time in my logic-based life, I want to coast solely on the tail feathers of my heart.”

But he didn’t say that. Instead he said, “When I told you how busy I am, I figured you knew that meant I didn’t want anything serious.”

Mr. Corkscrew said something similar, only he admitted, point blank, it could never work. Not because of the distance, which was enormous, but because he worked 6.5 days a week and had no time for destiny. But how could I tell that to my heart when the tiniest ray of joy was beginning to tear it open? In my world, logic doesn’t play a role in love.

He never asked me if I thought it was impossible. What if I said no? What if I said I’d be willing to bungee jump off the wall of logic and plummet to the depths of possibility?

So yeah, being the owner of a heart pretty much sucks. I figure you spend a good 75 percent of your dating life cleaning up some sort of sopping mess of disappointment and devastation. And while I believe investing in a good mop is important, I also believe that investing in a resilient heart is your best bet. Despite all the cleaning up I’ve had to do, I’ve never given up on love. Not once.

Even if men have been pigs and lied to me or gawked at other women or objectified me or didn’t want me despite all my best attempts, I haven’t stopped believing men are good. My friends think me crazy. Don’t I know what’s out there?

Yes, I do.

And that’s why I persist in believing. I believe in the strength of men. I believe in their character. I believe in their kindness and their honesty. I believe in their compassion. I believe in those things because I’ve seen them, time and time again. Just when one man dashes my hopes, another one swoops in and builds me a city of hope. Just when one man makes me feel like I’m not enough, another one comes in to make me feel like I’m excessively worthy.

It’s like anything, really. People are a crapshoot. Men and women have in them the potential for so much good, but not everyone uses their potential. So sometimes you get some not-so-good examples from each gender.

Really, it all boils down to faith.

And I’ve got a surplus of it.

That’s why I decided to write about the men I know. While it‘s true that not all of them had a clean driving record, in the end they turn out to be much better than I realized. It’s like that book where you think the main character is a villain all along, but on the last page he ends up rescuing the maiden. Turns out, he was never out to get her like you thought. You were reading the book the way you expected it to be, not the way it really was.

It took me awhile, but I went back and reread all my relationships. In many cases, I even relived them. I talked to the men who had hurt or confused me, left me or used me as a sexual pawn, and I got down to business. Mostly, my question was always the same: why?

The answers I received weren’t as I expected them to be; they were honest, straightforward and, for the most part, clarifying. To think I could’ve saved myself a life’s tome of sorrow the length of War and Peace if I’d only just asked. But then, I guess that would have totally ruined the ending.

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He "Hops" From Girl to Girl: Why Mr. Beer Man Left A Sour Taste in My Mouth

In the picture, my arm is wrapped around his shoulder and I’m laughing. I’m wearing a cardigan that felt soft on my body and, after a glass of champagne, so did my heart.

Aaron is looking at me and smiling. I used to like the way he looked at me.

I suppose it’s his secret weapon. He used it the night we were sitting across from each other at a wine bar, a table full of our mutual friends, obscure Belgian beer and plates of goat cheese and olives laid out before us. I was about to bring a piece of bread to my lips when I noticed him staring.

It wasn’t a casual stare by any means. It was a deep, piercing stare that I felt in my toes. And it lasted forever. There was nothing coy about the way he looked at me. His eyes seared into my flesh and suddenly I felt hot all over. And totally self conscious. So I looked away.

But you can’t look away from a guy like Aaron for long. Thoughts of him interrupt your sleep. Imagining what it would be like to feed him a grape, run your fingers through his hair…

I decided to email him. And I got a response back minutes later saying he was waiting for me to contact him. Apparently, he’d had a crush on me since the first time we met at a party months before.

“Let’s go for a drink,” he said.

It was that simple.

But then, beginnings always are, aren’t they?

Flash forward six years and several thousand beers later, to the two of us in his L.A. apartment. I came for a visit (on his request), under the premise that he'd take me out to dinner, we'd cook together and I could get a fresh perspective on the slightly turbulent life I was leading at the time.

Turns out I got none of that. All I got was the image of him splayed out on his couch, watching sports. I opened his apartment door after a night out with a friend, and he was belching and scratching himself.

"Did you have fun with your friend?" he asked in a tone far too syrupy to be real. "He's special, isn't he?"

If I thought he had a heart in his moldy little body, I'd say he was jealous.

Years ago, after the first time his eyes seared into mine, I would've given anything for his jealousy. His passion for life, confidence in his dreams and free-spirited attitude reeled me in, hook line and sinker. Every time he'd come into town on break from grad school, we'd spend entire weekends together, dining out and staying in. He would call while he was away, telling me where he ate and what he made for dinner that weekend. We'd talk about our dreams, he'd encourage me and I'd ooh and aah about his wonderful adventures.

Never, in all that time, did he make me feel insignificant. But he did when I stood in his apartment, still wide-eyed from people watching and celebrity spotting. I wanted to tell him all about it, share a part of my world with him, just as I suppose I always wanted. But he wasn't interested.

Unless I was bent over his couch, he didn't see me at all. Not a single part.

We had dinner once while I was there. And it was only because he was hungry. I ate off his plate. There was a giant pile of crab legs before us, and as I hungrily tore into mine, I told him he was bad at being kind.

"It's not what I do," he said. "I know it's what you need, but I can't be that guy for you."

"If you can't give me what I deserve, then I don't want what you have to give me," I said, shocking myself and him once the words escaped my lips.

Wow.

I really meant it. I actually believed I'm worth more than second-hand seafood and a chorus of belching. Finally.

I guess I should thank Mr. Beer Man for finally revealing his lack of heart to me. All this time, I was lured in by his culinary prowess and his passion for life. I forgot that a passion for me should also be on the list.

The picture was taken not long after we met. The way he's looking at me was real. I know he saw me for who I really was. I know he still does.

One night, when he was drunk, he told me he doesn't treat other girls the way he treats me.

"Do you think everyone deserves the same respect?" he asked. "You're different. You're not bland. You're not boring. You're interesting. You have passion. You're better."

When my cab drove off, I watched him standing there in the middle of the street. He looked sort of small. Nothing like the tough, cocky guy he tries so hard to be. He stood there until he was a speck in my rear window. I'll never know exactly what he was thinking, and the good part is, I no longer care. I do know one thing, though. You don't always have to go back to the restaurant to remember the meal. Sometimes, the memory is enough to keep you full.

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We Had Fun When No One Was Watching: King Kong Held Me Tightly, Then Let Me Go

My Ipod is playing a song from King Kong. It’s the haunting instrumental that played when Kong and Ann were skating together on a frozen pond. Kong was falling and sliding around and Ann would help him up and laugh and then he would laugh (as much as a giant ape can). No one was out to kill him and he was sharing this genuine moment of joy and happiness with the woman he loved.

You can guess what comes next. In movies, just like real life, moments of purity and innocence always come to a screeching halt.

The relationship George and I shared was very much like that of Kong and Ann. At first, he wanted to steal me away from everyone and keep me all to himself. He was selfish and brutish that way, and I loved it. I was his refuge and his happy place. I made him laugh and broke down the walls he had all around him. I would’ve been his prisoner forever if only he knew how to make me feel the same.

Instead, he starved me. For so long I subsisted on the breadcrumbs of affection he threw my way. Most times I was parched and gaunt. He was depleting me of the things necessary to sustain my heart. Just like the lonely beast from the movie, George had no idea how to love.

We had our moments of quiet skating, though. Sometimes we’d steal away from our jobs and lie together on a blanket under a tree in our favorite park. We’d take our shoes off and just wrap our bodies together, silently breathing in the purity of that moment. I have a picture of him with eyes closed, face touching mine, looking so in love. He sent me an email once that said he wished he were a squirrel so that he could climb up on my shoulders and sit with me all day.

“I wouldn’t need much,” he said, “just a few acorns and you, always.”

Whenever I got sad, I’d imagine him so small and helpless, hovering against my body for warmth. I would have loved him forever. But ours was a relationship doomed from the start. We fought all the time. Mostly because he couldn’t communicate and never showed me affection. The older he got and the more wrapped up he became in his career, the less I saw him. The less he touched me or held me. Afternoons in the park were now just a silly fantasy. I was lucky if I saw him once a week for a quick meal and stilted conversation. He changed in the four years we were together. I guess it was the stress. But he withdrew into himself and I was dying. I needed intimacy. I needed to hear words of kindness and love. Instead, I heard only silence.

Today as I was taking my walk, I set my Ipod on shuffle. Just as I rounded a corner, the wind blew lightly against my cheek. It reminded me of the air on the day George and I lay huddled beneath that giant oak tree, both of us hoping that moment would never end. I remember our shoes, tangled up next to each other on the grass. Suddenly, as if on cue, the King Kong song starts playing. It’s been years since I heard that song. We watched the movie together when it first came out and were both touched by the innocence of that scene. He made me a CD for Valentine’s Day with only that haunting melody on it. He also gave me an orchid and a poem he wrote in French. He loved me. Somewhere in a place hidden, like in the forest where beast and beauty shared their last moment of freedom, he loved me. But like the movie’s final happy scene, it was destined to end.

Soon, police and helicopters surrounded the pair. People tried to shoot at Kong. He held tightly to Ann, wanting to shield her from harm.

“Go,” she cried. “Go.”

He turned to look at her, and in that moment you could see everything he felt for her and always would. There was sadness, gratitude, longing and great love. Those big eyes held so much love.

She knew. She always did.

He held her tightly, then he let her go.

And he ran off in the night somewhere far away. She knew she would never see him again, but she would never forget the good times they had when no one was watching.

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Words, Not Wine, Got Me Drunk: At the Table with Mr. Corkscrew

I guess a lot of people leave their hearts in San Francisco.

Perhaps they misplace it at the Ferry Building, or drop it in the Bay as they’re trying to feed the fish. It’s a lot easier to do than I would have imagined. Mine just sort of fell out of me, after squeezing its way through my esophagus. I started coughing and wheezing, sounding like a cat ridding itself of a hairball.

I guess it was a heart ball. When it landed on the carpet in front of me, I could see years of sadness and confusion tangled inside. It was blood-stained, and there were fossilized tears at the center that looked like tiny shells in a sea of moss and dirt. I’m sure the heart ball didn’t come out just because of him, but his treatment of me during our last visit had an effect not unlike that of ipecac. It was time to vomit him out once and for all. After all, it had been six years since we started this soul-crushing affair.

We met in 2002, at a communal table in a Napa Valley restaurant. I was the bored food writer, disabling a quenelle with my left hand and heralding a Cosmopolitan with my right, and he was the charming wine buyer with a puckish smile and two inebriated companions flanked on both sides of his smallish frame. We had been passing flirtations back and forth like a roto-virus in a Kindergarten class all evening, and when the drunk guy between us got up to go to the bar, our bodies were magnetically drawn to each other. We went on a date later that week and kept in touch after I flew back home, 2,000 miles away. I held out hope that things would take off from there, that we’d build something with our words and later, our bodies and our hearts.

He would send me emails the length of War and Peace, yet his prose was flowery and superficial, scattered across the computer screen like a Japanese crossword puzzle. You know they read backwards, the Japanese. Adrian felt backwards. His heart, like his words, always seemed upside down.

I said things like “potential” and “effort,” and he said things like “capricious” and “ephemeral.”

Why, then, did I always try to keep rewriting his story? Maybe it’s because I believed that if the ending were anything like the beginning, it would be worth years of patient editing to get there. Red marks be damned, I wanted a love story out of the deal.

It seemed only natural. Even the middle read like a great novel. On my last visit to San Francisco, he took me to the symphony, for moonlit walks across the city and out for tapas. There was fried chickpeas and chili powder; poached eggs and bacon on wilted Italian lettuce; wood fired broad beans and tomatoes; and celery root puree with roasted apples and Buddha’s hand oil drizzled lavishly across the top. And there was even dessert: a warm serving of his lips, drizzled across the small of my back, his arms, a shell of skin surrounding a frozen parfait of me, now thawing into a pool of sugar-crusted hope. When I was lying in the dark, so close to him we were almost sewn together, I thought I tasted a promise — an as-yet-unknown promise, punctuated by a silent announcement of consideration.

And when he dropped me at the airport, hugging me so fiercely I thought I might explode into peanut-shaped fragments, I truly believed he had invited me not only into his city, but also into his heart.

“Next time, I’ll take you to SPQR,” he said, the gleam of a small child in his eyes.

The whole way home my mind played a symphony of “next times.” Next time I will wear that red dress with the slit. Next time I will bring him my dog-eared copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” He likes Kundera. Next time I will make him a frittata for breakfast, with sundried tomatoes and freshly grated Parmesan.

But now is next time, and he is gone. Gone to see the world without me.“Was just in Vail for my annual trip,” he wrote. “Thailand is in two weeks. My business partners don’t like me being gone so long, but ah, life is out there, waiting.”

And so am I. Sometimes I want to slap myself for being one of those dreadfully obtuse girls I normally make fun of — the ones who mold their perception of reality around the first man who pays them a kind word. I’m not that girl. I’m the fiercely independent type who shuns marriage, has no desire for children and travels the world solo. But this time was different. Something about the way he touched me, the undulating swirl of blue in his eyes…

I emailed him after several weeks of an empty inbox, asking what went wrong, and he gave his usual reply: “Intention and action are, unfortunately, two very different things for me.” Yes, they always were. I had always given in to the excuse that he just wasn’t ready. He was a successful restaurateur. He was inundated with responsibility. He had no time for someone 20 minutes across town, let alone me, who lived 2,000 miles away. His superficial words and inattentiveness told me all I really needed to know, yet I waded through the years like a cautious beachcomber, hoping the next time we met, he would look at me and know I was the time he wanted to spend.

“I don’t care if you live in Egypt,” I imagined him saying. “I would scale the pyramids to get to you.”

Okay, so a little far-fetched, but I’d at least hoped he’d throw in a line or two about frequent flyer miles or something. Good thing I’m already adept at flying solo.

Now it's time to become adept at rewriting this story by creating a plot line that doesn’t result in him finally loving me, but me loving myself enough for the both of us. You know, the antithetically obtuse girl who scales her own pyramid and realizes that love shouldn't require editing. The best kinds are always a little grammatically incorrect.

In my new ending, I want to be the girl who accepts the fact that she will never catch the man who whispered into her ear the night she wore the pink orchid in her hair, “Let’s see what happens.”

Sometimes I imagine Adrian in my arms again, the way it was when I thought we were both part of the same dream. He’d confess that he has always been afraid of me. “You’re the closest thing I’ve ever known to real,” he’d say. “And I’ve forgotten what that feels like.”

For six years, San Francisco was real to me. I loved the hills; the way the wind floats magically from the Bay and blows kisses at your face and the sound of trolley cars clanging their bells in the distance. I loved a man who lived there, too. Or at least, I loved parts of him. His cheekbones, the way they seemed drawn into his face like the curves of Lombard Street, the feel of his fingertips on my stomach, like tiny flecks of sugar on a rugelach.

And his heart. So close, but like me, thousands of miles away.

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