I spent the day on her couch recovering from Saturday night's birthday bash for a friend at Bowl-O-Rama, while Oscar slept upstairs until 3:15pm (winner), having taken a bagel sandwich to the face and four Advil. After bowling we had gone out downtown Annapolis to McGarvey's, where we actually first met. It was wonderfully surreal to sit in the same chair (wearing a similarly low cut dress), drinking and engaging in merriment with Oscar just as I had four and a half years ago on the night of our first encounter, with very minor variations. I suppose both of our brains have swelled, mine from law school and his from medical school, so our heads were distinctly huger. His sweaters are nicer, and his jeans are more expensive. I am definitely paler, since now I spend most of my time under florescent lights looking like this guy.
Other things are different - there is a newly introduced desperation and mania in our nights out, knowing that the time spent as FREEDOM is transient and woefully short, that in between conversations we will return, unconsciously, to the acknowledgment of a crushing workweek hanging just overhead, and that we hear in the pause between Journey songs an urgent and petulent voice of Responsibility over and over again. There is now, interspersed with the boozy merriment, a sort of distracted, repetitive look thrown toward a certain future, where awaits regret, exhaustion, and fuzzy-headed attempt at effort. Which, of course, is where I am right now, eating an eight dollar sandwich in front of my computer in my office with the door closed, wishing I could fast forward to the next cloud break of a weekend, and do it all over again. Fun life.
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