april 7th, huh?

I’m tired.
I’m wearing shiny blue spandex.
I owe North Caroline four dollars.
You know, it’s been that kind of a day.

But the bookends, they were nice.

The morning was lovely. Full of the sun, full of this state park that the locals call Seven Thousand Acres; full of glimpses of deer that were so quick as they bounded into the brush that I pretended it was centaurs I was seeing instead.

But the middle of the day…Oh, my.

I saw my accountant and I did not get good news. I told myself not to cry, but it was like telling yourself not to sneeze when the world seems to be that library-esque atmosphere that depends on absolute silence. Cause then BAM! you’re sneezing and why did God have to make sneezes so loud?

So I am sitting there, furiously wiping my eyes and not making a sound, trying to act interested in the somewhat patriotic poster that is to the left of my accountant’s head, when he starts to tell me to just calm down, that it’s gonna be okay.

Which is kind of the kiss of death while attempting the great magic trick of not crying when that’s all you want to do.

And then he hands me tissues.

And the thing about tissues is that I don’t think my family regularly used them while I was growing up. I never really know what to do with them. I mean, I wipe my tears away with my hand just fine, thank you. But when someone goes to the trouble of locating that pastel colored box and then hands it to you, there’s some sort of reciprocity expected.

So I awkwardly blow my nose and then, not finding a trash can, hold the used tissue for the rest of my stay.

And my accountant, he’s so nice and well, he knows about what I’ve been going through–having known me for a couple years now–and he always tries to be really encouraging when he sees me. Tells me I’m looking good and things like that.

But still, the news is discouraging and he keeps asking me what he can do. But short of–I don’t know, a generous donation on his part–I just tell him that it’s okay, to just let me sign the papers and be done with it.

The good thing is that by the time I leave, I don’t want to cry anymore. I realize that in the grand scheme of things, this latest news really isn’t so bad at all.

And then I get a phone call from the jewelry dealer with whom I am about to meet at Grotto Pizza, a place I worked for a day and then quit, but that’s another post. He’s about to look at my stuff and hopefully buy it, but when he tells me that he’ll be wearing a black button down shirt, but it won’t be buttoned, I have to stifle a laugh.

And wonder just what the heck it is I am getting myself into anyway.

I finally see him, and true to his word, his shirt is not buttoned. Though he does have an undershirt on and there is some chest hair popping out the top, so there’s that. I say hi, which is apparently another way to say, Please kiss me, cause that’s what he does. I don’t mind though; he’s super Italian, Joe is, and I can tell that is a normal thing for him.

Plus I haven’t been kissed in a while.

Just kidding.

Well, I haven’t been kissed in a while, but it’s not like Joe’s kiss made up for it or anything.

Anyway.

And oh, I can call Joe super Italian, because I am Italian. Though my quarter Italian blood would probably not be classified as super Italian.

Anyway again.

He looks at my jewelry and immediately asks if I was engaged. Actually, married, I tell him, and then I get that look, the one that says something to the effect of poor thing.  And then he asks me what happened. So I give the short answer: He’s not who I thought he was. He makes sad noises and asks me if the diamond in my ring is real.

It better be, I tell him, but at this point nothing would surprise me.

He tells me that he’ll give me $160 in cash for all my jewelry and I don’t care enough to go anywhere else and try to get a better deal. He explains that engagement/wedding bands have almost no resell value and that jewelry stores mark them up by sometimes 1000%. I believe him without even caring if it’s BS or not. And as I watch him weigh my painfully light jewelry, I decide that if anybody ever proposes to me again, it’d be nice if he gives me a solid gold bowling ball. You know, something that will retain it’s value and be good and heavy on that scale.

He asks me one more time what the guy did. I can tell he wants a story, so what the heck? he doesn’t know me at all; I give it to him. I tell him the ugly details. Not all of them, but the gist, anyway. He is satisfactorily shocked and appalled.

As he kisses me one more time before I leave he tells me, You’re so gorgeous you won’t have a hard time finding somebody at all. I think to myself that I’ve already had somebody. That I’d like to specify somebody awesome now, if that’s okay.

Oh, and the spandex. Right. I’m wearing spandex because I took a modern dance class tonight.  And then on my way home from the class, I had a conversation with Drew. It started out about the phone or something, but it ended with him telling me that he got a certificate of divorce in the mail. Which is not exactly the way I wanted to find out, like we were in it together, or something.

But apparently I am divorced and have been since April 7th. And after I found out, I was wracking my brain, trying to figure out what I did on the 7th anyway, cause whatever it was, I was doing it as someone who is officially single.

Remember. I prefer single over divorced.

Oh, and solid gold bowling balls over diamond rings.

And after hearing that news, I needed to walk very far. I needed to see some beautiful things and listen to the sound of water rushing by, I think. I needed to be reminded that I am okay, that I am me, that life is good.

So I did. I walked for a long time while my phone was blowing up with texts from a cast of stars who care about me. And I never did get to change out of the shiny blue spandex.

Which is why I texted my friend at one point, telling her that I am sitting against a tree while wearing shiny blue spandex, laughing about that while crying at the same time. The animals must think I’m cray-cray.

And then that friend, Lindsay, she came over. She helped me bake a terrible batch of cookies that I was trying to make for my nice accountant. Well, I wasn’t trying to make terrible ones, that’s just how they ended up. And Lindsay is an amazing cook, but I unfortunately did some faulty math before she got there and added something like 14 cups of flour to the batter when it had only called for 8.

Oops.

Maybe my over indulgence with the flour was due to the fact that my spandex are so tight. Or that my day has been a doozey. Or that it has been a long time since I’ve been kissed, you know. But those cookies never did see the inside of an oven. Instead, they are inside a trash can, poor little wasted things.

But I am not.

Inside a trash can, I mean.

I’m alive and I think there’s a lot of room for good things in my life. Maybe even better than my shiny blue spandex pants. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say definitely better than my shiny blue spandex pants.

I know, call me crazy.