July 27, 2001
Krogering
Arby's has good music. It's rather odd to be sitting there in the plastic booth in a standard fast food joint and they're playing mozart. The two are simply not cohesive.
I wanted to write again yesterday because it was a crazy schizophrenic day. It will, of course, seem mundane to the rest of you.
Mom and Justin and I went krogering. And o, the twisted hand of fate. We go in and my friends Jackie and Matt were working and they say, hey, Ryan's here! And I'm like, holy shit, you don't say! After a brief liason with Hampton (who works in the photo lab under the alias of 'The Incredibly Amazing Wonderous Photoboy', and yes, he did manage to fit all of that onto one name tag), I began to peruse the aisles. I run into Katie, but no Ryan. Jackie swears she didn't see him leave. Keep in mind that I haven't seen him for a week, and I'm ecstatic at the thought of getting to. But it was not to be.
So we left Kroger's. And we run into Amber, driving, in the parking lot. And then Bill is getting out of the car to go to Kroger's, too.
What the hell is with Kroger's? It's, like, a mecca or something.
At any rate, it turned out that Ryan had left Kroger's mere moments before we entered, so Fate was fucking with me. As usual. But he and I ended up going to a movie that night, anyway.
And I felt kind of weird. Like, I'd missed him, but he wasn't saying what I felt he should have. I was anxious for him to be anxious for me, and I was getting the feeling that he wasn't.
But I was wrong.
We saw Final Fantasy all by ourselves. The theater was literally empty. It was cool. Both the movie and the fact that the theater was desolate. It was funny, because we made all these jokes about making out. But we ended up watching the movie.
Or, most of it, anyway.
Wicked, wicked laughter.
I will not relate what followed, because I think it is too precious to be put into my feeble words. All I can say is that we parked at Golf View afterwards and he held me for forty-five minutes. He made me cry. He said things that made me feel totally unworthy of him. I haven't been given a choice where he is concerned. I wasn't supposed to fall in love at eighteen. He wasn't supposed to be it.
But I was speechless, as I am now in trying to convey it. You see those moments on tv or in movies where it's like time stops, like in Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise tells Renee that she completes him, or in Ever After when the prince uses Drew Barrymore's name; those inexplicable moments that literally freeze your heart. When Ryan spoke, I knew in my mind that I would never forget what he said, that this was it, this was what it comes down to.
I can't explain. I'll probably be getting a frantic call from Kelsi to find out what he said.
astera at night