how it starts

She stopped writing again because she had run out of words for that place at that time and run out of honest ideas

I spent six months in a place where people look over their shoulders and last night I was walking along a bridge at night heading out to drink, for drinks, and I was passed by little old ladies walking their dogs in the dark and fifteen year old girls. Viva old ladies and fifteen year old girls walking after dark in melting snow.

Lately my boyfriend has been complaining that I dress like a fifteen year old girl because somewhere along the last six months I stopped caring about Smart Shirts and Black Heels. He will wax about the "Old L." and likes riding boots over skate shoes, blazers over hooded sweatshirts. I don't have the heart to tell him he might have fallen in love with a three piece suit instead of me.

Love, where it should be getting clearer, is only getting more ambiguous. I was having drinks with The Boys last night, my professional cohort, and another one had popped the question. This holiday was also particularly filled with people younger than me suddenly wearing rings at home, I said it was like a party that everyone forgot to invite me to.

My best friend, The Ginger, said "I think I missed that party about six times."

But The Boys are generally older than me, so it's less no-date-to-the-prom than lighting the way of matrimonial fidelity for yours truly. We talk about how he did it. Originally he had planned lighting candles and writing Marry Me in the snow outside their apartment. The night before he plans to do it another guy in his building did the exact same thing in the same spot he had chosen and his future father-in-law, over dinner at their apartment, laughed "look at that asshole!"

I say matrimonial fidelity because this is what marriage has come to represent in my head. A year ago, when everything was career and aforementioned suiting, marriage was like brokering a deal. A logical next step for smart planners. What we do. Then somewhere along the way I realized that what I was going to have trouble giving up the most was other people, and I'm not willing to do it halfway.

The most recent was four and a half years younger than me, sexy in a way that would have intimidated me at that age. More than a physical thing, it's the conversations that surround a non-repetitive moment, the things mumbled at discovery, the preludes, the saccharine painless goodbyes.

Or maybe it's that I always liked short stories better than Anna Karenina.