Thirty Minutes

Thirty minutes was all it took for everything I called normal to drastically shift and be flipped upside down. Thirty minutes was all it took for a ten month relationship to end and for every piece of my now ex-boyfriend to be removed from my apartment. His contacts case is gone, my apartment keys have been removed from his key ring (and his from mine), and his bike is no longer next to mine in the garage sharing a bike lock. That was it. It's over. And my heart hurts.

I know in the long run it is the right thing to do, but that doesn't stop my heart from aching or my fingers from automatically calling him when I leave work. 

As I drove out of the garage at work a few days after the thirty-minute incident I pressed the green call button on my steering wheel. 

"Call. Say 'by number' or 'by name'" said the voice coming out of the dashboard.

"Name"

"Who would you like to call?"

"Mr. Good Grammar."

"Call Mr. Good Grammar? Say 'yes' to proceed. Otherwise say 'back' or 'cancel.'"

"Yes."

"Calling Mr. Good Grammar."
 

Ring. Ring...
 

"No! Stop! Ah!"

I frantically hit the red button on the steering wheel hoping with all of my hardest hopes that his phone hadn't yet started ringing. 

I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to ask how his day was. I wanted to tell him about my ridiculous trainee in class. I wanted to tell him about what a pill Wilbur had been that morning before work. I wanted to ask him to come over and take a walk downtown with me. I wanted a hug. But I knew I couldn't. I ended the relationship and I had to suffer the consequences of my choices. 

My eyes started to well up with tears, so I pressed the green button again. I tried calling my mother, a co-worker, a friend from Thailand, a friend in California, and a friend back in New York. No one answered. I didn't leave messages. 

By the time I arrived home my head hurt. My head hurt from trying not to cry. My head hurt from trying not to think about the guy that I had spent the better part of my life in Madison loving. 

 

I am now able to count the time since the breakup in weeks, so hopefully I will soon stop counting the minutes. 

When my friend Jeff asked if the breakup was bad I hesitated before saying, "well, no..." It wasn't bad, but I definitely felt far from good, or even okay. I was grateful when Dan chimed in with, "good or bad, it's still a breakup." 

Thank you, Dan.

I didn't need the justification for my roller coaster-like emotions, but it was nice to feel a little less crazy.

I came into my office on a Monday morning to find the few items I had left at his place in a bag under my desk. He had warned me it would be there, but that wasn't enough preparation for the ache my heart felt. That was it. My stuff was with me and his stuff was with him. The end.

I have my good days and my bad days. Heck, I still have my good minutes and my bad minutes, but I will be just fine. I know that much crazier and more significant things have happened in shorter periods of time, but for me, and for my right now, those thirty minutes rocked my world.

Bachelor Number 5: Mr. Good Grammar

After the bruises on my hip, knees and ego healed, I felt like I could finally muster the confidence to face another date. This also happened to be right around the time Mr. Good Grammar asked me out for a drink.

I sent Mr. Good Grammar a message a few weeks prior during one of my lunch break Ok Cupid sessions. His photo looked nice and his grammatically perfect profile and mention of his similarities to the Cookie Monster melted my heart. My blood pressure increased every time I logged into the site in hopes of receiving a message from Mr. Good Grammar. It took a few days, but it eventually came through. Not only was it short and sweet, the message kept up with the grammatically correct precedence he had set. Over the next two weeks his responses were erratic. Then I received the message that I had been dreading: “Life has been a little crazy lately. We had our annual conference this past week.” Oh no. I had been afraid of this. My sneaking suspicion of him working for the same company was confirmed and I closed my browser.

Amy, a coworker who had been very interested in my dating shenanigans, asked if I had heard from Mr. Good Grammar. I lowered my eyes, and hesitated before saying, “yes, but that’s over.” She had a look of genuine concern when she asked, “what happened?!” I told her that my greatest fear of him working for the same company had been confirmed, therefore, we could not date. Her look of concern turned to a look of disgust. “Are you kidding me? You aren’t going to write back to him because you work at the same place? That’s ridiculous. Do you know how many people in our age group work here?” Over the next few minutes we bickered back and forth until I caved and begrudgingly agreed to respond to his message. And later that evening, I did just that.

As our messages were exchanged over the next few weeks, I enjoyed the conversation, but was still hesitant about working at the same place. On the other hand, I was thrilled by the speed at which our messages were being sent back and forth. He clearly wasn’t sitting like an anxious puppy just waiting for my messages, but he was polite in the amount of time it took him to respond. My mind began to wander. He was probably busy at work with a life outside of surfing the internet, had lots of friends that kept him from constantly updating his profile and was dashingly handsome.

I knew that his office was in a different building than mine, but I frequently worked in his building and had a fear I would run into him at work before we had planned to meet each other. Sure enough, my fear materialized as we passed in the hall weeks before we planned to meet.

While walking through the halls with a coworker I saw two men walking toward us. I had the sneaking suspicion, lump in my throat and butterflies in my stomach that told me Mr. Good Grammar was one of the approaching men. My face burned and the nervous sweats kicked in when I was close enough to confirm that he was the person I had seen in a handful of photos. I did my best not to make eye contact, and Margaret and I turned the corner.  We returned to the classroom to find a note from Mr. Good Grammar and his friend, and yes, I was correct, Pete and Mr. Good Grammar signed their names. I only hoped he hadn’t noticed my name tag in the front row.

It was about two weeks later when Mr. Good Grammar decided to ask me out for a drink, just as I was beginning to think he didn’t want to go out with me. He sent me a message asking if I would like to meet him for a drink at The Mason Lodge. Umm… Mason Lodge?

I asked my office mate, Mr. Madison, what and where The Mason Lodge was. He replied with a question, asking why I would need to know. I told him about my prospective date and he gave me another funny look before answering, “isn’t that the men’s secret society? Whoa. Could he really be taking you there for a date? Are women even allowed?”

I did some googling and questioning before finally sending Mr. Good Grammar a message. “Sure! I would love to meet for a drink. How about Friday? Where is The Mason Lodge?” I felt a little silly asking for the address of a place that anyone with a computer would have been able to google, but the prospect of being invited to a secret men’s society and lodge warranted the address request and possibly an escort into the building.

Mr. Good Grammar responded with the address, I copy-pasted into google, and everything made perfect sense! The Mason Lodge was really The Mason Lounge! Mr. Good Grammar wasn’t so perfect.

We met for drinks and I instantly knew that despite the slightly confusing autocorrect error from “lodge” to “lounge,” he was pretty darn perfect.

To be continued…