Originally posted 06.11.2005

Friday night the young man my roommate’s been seeing for, oh, on six months now, informed her that he was in love with his roommate.

“She’s young, beautiful, very thin. Socially involved. A Marxist vegan. Pretty much the opposite of me,” she said. “So if that’s what he wants, then it’s best we’re not together.”

Friday night she was angry, healthy mad, defiant. “I won’t be shedding any tears over this,” she said.

But it wasn’t so easy today. I returned from a race and met up with her in the kitchen where I had, early this morning, left a couple of roses and a card in which I apologized for not being able to come up with anything better than: “He has a lisp.” (Well he does. Lispy, banjo-picking vegan.) She got a chuckle out of the card, but the roses made her cry.

They aren’t red roses. Pale sort of apricot-y, not the stuff associated with romantic love. But we do associate gifts of flowers with love or sympathy, and it sucks to get one when you want the other.

She’d been guarded through the relationship, acknowledging his short-comings, potential problems: he’s nine years younger than she, about to quite the job he hates with nothing on the horizon, the object of his affection is only one of three roommates with whom he shares a loft space in Long Island City (so hard to get to Queens from Brooklyn), he’s a vegan, doesn’t want kids…. Basically, he’s young.

But she was having a good time. He had pursued her doggedly, winning her confidence and affection over great conversation and gentlemanly behavior. “And he’s built like a brick shithouse,” she giggled one afternoon. (True. Lispy, but built.) “I’m just going to have fun with this,” she said, with some frequency. And she was. She was happy, in a cautious sort of way. And I was really happy for her.

So, what was he thinking? This falling in love with the roommate business didn’t happen overnight. Careless, careless.

But what I don’t get is why there isn’t someone loving her. Hasn’t been in a really long time. She’s loveable. Odd, intense, yes, but not everyone wants conventional. She has a following of admirers. Where’s the lover?

I feel heartbroken myself, in sympathy. And puzzled. And pissed off. I gave her Stefanie’s pep-talk about how he, the one, could be out there, you never know when, which is why, despite Stef’s surface pessimism about New York men, she never leaves her house without putting a little effort into her appearance. (I do, all the time. When you spend as much time as I do sweat-drenched in ill-fitting running clothes, lip gloss becomes moot as far as a dash to the deli goes.) So when I left she had donned a pink skirt and was making plans to go out and buy herself something pretty. Put a little of that ‘love-me’ energy out there.

Yeah, he’s out there. I know he is. And I hope he finds her. Soon.