dream_boy ClairE I'm pretty lonely. That's one thing I know for sure about myself. I'm not quite depressed anymore. I'm pretty happy with my life. I have great friends and I feel like I'm in control of most of my life. But I sure do want a partner. At work about a month ago, a book came across my desk. Why Mr. Right Can't Find You. Ha, I thought, this looks terrible. I love self-help books and if librarians know anything it's not to judge a book by its cover, so I started flipping through it. Hey, I said to myself. This isn't bad. I ended up reading the whole thing. His argument, to condense dreadfully, is that there are lots of great people out there with more than one match, but that it's difficult to run into each other, and that women should be more willing to meet that person in an unexpected moment. I'm pretty full of myself so I always think I look beautiful and that anyone I find attractive looking my way might be in love with me, so I've got that covered, but I thought his plea for women to be willing to go to a bar (that isn't gross or scary) alone thought-provoking. He's right, I thought to myself. I was going to go home and read after work tonight, but I'll go read at the bar. That was a Friday. Didn't get much reading done, but did spend some time there by myself before I left and was pleased with myself. The next night, I met up with a friend there after my night shift, so it was pretty late for me. I don't think I even met her there until 12:40. She was on the phone with her boyfriend and they were having what I think was their first fight, so I was waiting outside with her for quite a while. As I'm trying to be unobtrusive, this inordinately good-looking guy walks by. In fact, he's so hot that when my friend finally gets off the phone and we go in, I mention this to her. Lucky for me it's a small place and I spot him right away. I walk up to him and it looks like he's sitting on a stool at the bar with about three empty seats next to him. His keys on a carabiner are touching the next stool so I figured I'd be cute and ask him if it's "okay" if I sit on that one. However, he's actually standing up and leaning on the stool I asked for, so we go back and forth for a while until I let him win and take the seat. I expect there to be silence and am preparing to start up the conversation again, but as soon as I am settled on my seat he asks me, "So, ...?" I don't even remember how he started but we began talking and talking and talking, and my friend gets bored after an hour or so, and we're talking and drinking more, and he's a sculptor with a studio nearby so he's in the bar because he's waiting for paint to dry on something that he's working on, and he was raised by a "feminist atheist bitch" and he's from Maine but he sounds like he's from the South, and we can't go to my place because it is just absolutely trashed, although I can tell he wouldn't care that it's a tiny room with only a ClairE-sized futon mattress, because he's obviously my dream boy, because I followed what the book said and now this fucking gorgeous guy who works outside doing landscaping for a living is actively trying to take me home, so we go to his studio and he tears down my tights and eats me out against the wall, and he tells me his address so I don't have to worry about going to a stranger's house, and we take a cab to CVS to get condoms and he buys me a Mylar happy birthday balloon, then when we get home he has a fucking drum kit in his room ("I'm teaching myself") and he sleeps on a mattress too and he puts on incredible music I've never heard before and will kick myself for not taking down the name of later, then he puts on someone singing in French and I say, "Is that Nina_Simone?" and it is, and we talk about books and ideas and he fucks the everloving shit out of me, and in the morning he tells me about the non-fiction he is reading and lies on top of me and says, "Claire, I want you," so I'm only too happy to let him in me again, and I have to leave for a lunch date which kind of freaks him out because it sounds too bourgeois, and he told me the night before that he thinks I'm older than him, like 29?, even though I'm younger than he is, and he said I seem dignified, which seems like an odd thing to say about someone who got drunk and went home with you (and who isn't, at all), and doesn't like my asymmetrical haircut I gave myself which everyone agrees looks great (from fashion-forward friends to my boss's boss), so in the end it shouldn't be surprising that he says he'll call me but when I ask him to make plans he won't, and it isn't surprising now, over a month later, but at the time, man, that really hurt. 100614 ... ClairE from the future Update: ran into each other again, dared him to marry me, turned out he was psychotic and off meds, ran away to New York and never saw him again. 140807 what's it to you? who go blather from