The Rhinestones Helped a Little

I will always have this to remember:

On the day that will probably be the last day I will ever see the Wily Republican--the day I went up to say goodbye, goodbye, thanks for the last three years of random bizarreness--I was lacing up my shoes and getting ready to leave his house. I was thinking about what a strange day it had been. I was thinking it didn't seem fair that our last day together had to feel like it did, which was like nothing I'd ever felt with him. It wasn't good. It wasn't bad. It just was.

And I was worrying over all those things and threading my rhinestone buckles together when the Wily Republican farted. That's what I got. Right before I stood to hug him goodbye, he farted.

There were no pretty words or admissions or last secrets to be told. There was only farting.

It still confounds me that he and Katy spent two years being mortal enemies when they could've spent all that time being best friends and talking about poop and farts.

But before the strange goodbye, the Wily Republican took me to lunch. "Get ready for the best burger of your life," he told me.

We went to the Lion's Tap, which, it turned out, had been the subject of a report the WR had done in high school. "It used to be a fruit and vegetable stand," he said as he held the door open for me. "They have good rootbeer." I found it charming. And the thought of the WR writing a paper for some goofy little high school assignment charmed me even more than I can explain. So did the fact that he was wearing sandals, but that's neither here nor there.

Our lunch place had good burgers. It's pretty much all they do. Hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers. I admire a place like that. And I admire a place where you have to specify that you want your burger "California-style" if it's to have any veggies on it.

We both ordered our hamburgers California-style. We both ate fries. When I got full and couldn't finish the last two mouthfuls of my burger and tried to feed it to him, the Wily gave me a Look and said, "You will finish your burger because it is a really good burger." And--somehow--I managed to.

After lunch he suggested we go to the library. Talk about admiring something. You've got to admire a man who wants to take his English nerd friend to his hometown library. He knows me oh so well. "It's really, really nice. And big," he said. "I've wanted to show you this forever." A good library is my favorite kind of porn, so we went.

He let me loose in the library. I wandered through the fiction, the poetry, the young adult, and then the magazines. There was a part of me that wanted to lie down in the corner and have a good cry. For several reasons--the first being that the whole day seemed so off. He and I were off. We weren't doing our normal schtick. We weren't snappy, we weren't speaking dialogue that sounded like it had been lifted from the script of a sitcom. There were heavy and uncomfortable moments of silence, and they were making me want to put something through my eye. Nothing was right.

I also wanted to have a little lie-down because, really, this was it. This was my last time with him. And this was how I was going to remember it. As off. As strange. Sure, lunch was delicious and there were moments when I looked across the table and saw the boy that I know, love, and, oddly enough, respect, but other times he was an entirely new beast. He was girlfriended, tired, and quiet. I wanted to press a giant rewind button. Surely there were things we had left to say to each other, things we had left to do together. Couldn't we go back to a time where there was no censor? Couldn't we go back to a time where there was a distinct chance I'd see him without a shirt?

And later, after lunch, after the library, after we'd come home to watch an episode of Rescue Me on his TiVo, after I'd swallowed my tongue so I didn't say something like, Girlfriend? What girlfriend? Let's go pretend to nap.--after all that, I tucked my toes back into the rhinestone buckled shoes. I stood up. I looked at him. I felt like this was supposed to be one of those defining life moments, where I might learn something very important about him, about myself, about what's meant to be and what's not, but that didn't happen. Instead, the Wily Republican farted. And I rolled my eyes. And he walked me upstairs. And I turned into his chest and didn't say, "Don't let me leave." And he didn't say, "Stay." or "I miss you." or "I'm going to miss you." Instead, he said, "Good luck." He said, "Drive safe, okay?"

So I got into my car and I drove away. It was just starting to rain again, and Minnesota was dark with thunderclouds. They piled up, stacked right on top of each other, and dropped heavy pocks of rain onto my windshield. And there it was: the last time I would drive down 169, back toward Mankato, away from the cities, away from him, away from things I was supposed to be over but wasn't. I watched steam rise from a far-off hill, where a bolt of lightning had just struck. I wanted to turn the car around or park it or just cry. But I kept on going. I didn't look back. I just kept on driving.