I didn’t miss him all winter. Everytime I spoke to our mutual friends, who I guess he got custody over as I was limited to phone time with them, they would tell me he was being cold, sort of erratic, he was being exceedingly difficult. In some form or another he was costing them all money. He was not as exciting as he used to be. But now that it’s summer, I noticed a change in their voices. They’re all clearly laughing with him again, enjoying his company, discovering new aspects of his personality.
I am not jealous, per se. I do have someone else, someone way more suited to my personality. Someone who’s made me a little bit blonder, and a little bit tanner, and a hell of a lot healthier, but there’s still a separate heartbeat consistent for my first true love, and sometime in the middle of the night, when I know he cannot hear me, I’ll tell him: “New York, I miss you."
I have yet to go on a date in New York without breaking into a mental sweat. When scouting for potential mates, I have learned pretentious is better than shallow, irritatingly intelligent better than vapid. But every time I find myself two blocks away from any appointed date destination, panic ensues. I literally go through the syllabi of every course I can remember from NYU and every legitimate news article I have come across in recent memory. A friend of mine once told me she discovered the best conversation starters from a semester seminar she took called 'The Darwinian Revolution.' To this day, I regret not enrolling in that class. I could be married by now.