C is for Caroline

13 | the dependable silence of a studio apartment

These past few weeks—nay, the entirety of 2016—has been weird, to say the very least.

This year has been full of surprises, and not the good kind. The bullshit kind. Like falling in love out of nowhere only to be thrown out onto the street, naked as the day you were born. Or giving your boss your 4-weeks notice, only to find out that you were going to be fired at the end of the season anyway. Or like walking into your bathroom to find your roommate furiously scrubbing the sink with your only toothbrush. (Yeah, I know. I'm still hurt about that one.)

It feels like more things happened in my life this year than in the previous twenty years combined, and it's been kind of overwhelming.

And if that's not bad enough, on top of everything that's been going on in my personal life, all of my idols and role models have started dropping like flies. First it was David Bowie, then it was Prince, and then they fucking rolled back around and got Muhammad Ali!!

MUHAMMAD. ALI.

The greatest of all time!

And I get that I didn't know any of them personally or anything, but it still fucking hurts. I'm convinced that having to take in all this death and loss is unnatural. It has to be. I've never been a very "spiritual" person, but I can say for a fact that these deaths do not sit right in my spirit. They've put me on edge, and for the past week, I've been ready to really fuck shit up.

I've been doing as many things as I can that are out of the ordinary so that at least when the bullshit surprises return, I'll be more ready for them. Or at least less sure of what to expect, and therefore, more willing to just accept what I get.

For example, I started dating again.

Well...okay, I guess 'dating' might be a stretch. I matched with a girl on tinder though and we went out for drinks on Wednesday. It wasn't much, but it was my first time out with anyone since Hurricane Caroline tore through my life, so I was proud of myself.

We actually had a pretty good time. Her name's Jenna and she works as an editorial assistant for some publisher. She wasn't my first choice of companion for the night, but the two girls I'd messaged before her didn't respond in time, so...

Anyway, Jenna was pretty cute. Kind of short, which I usually like, but for some reason felt a little weird. I was genuinely shocked when she stood up from the table to hug me after I arrived twenty minutes late to the restaurant, and her head didn't even reach my shoulders. I felt like I was on a date with a fucking oompa loompa.

And maybe I've just gotten too used to looking Caroline square in the eyes during our rendezvous, but I decided less than ten minutes into the date that there wouldn't be a second one. I changed my mind somewhere around the one-hour mark.

Jenna was quite the laugher, and at first I found it a little annoying, not gonna lie. Her laugh was nasal and high-pitched and it made me wonder if she was mocking me in some inside-joke kind of way. She talked too much about her annoying supervisor and the year she'd spent in Taiwan, and it made me miss the dependable silence of Caroline's studio apartment. The way Caroline spoke only when she needed to, not just so that she could fill empty space or listen to the sound of her voice.

Jenna's laughter grew on me though. She laughed at all my jokes and it made me think I was much funnier than I actually am, and when she laughed, her nose would do this cute little thing where it scrunched up, pulling her entire face inwards toward a single point.

She also asked me questions about myself like where I'm from, what my family's like, what I'm doing on an app like tinder, and why I even chose her (which, in reality, I didn't, but she didn't need to know that). And I found myself eager to answer her questions—to talk about myself with someone who actually fucking cared for a change.