Hello, I Dislike You Intensely. Have a Nice Day.

Still cannot fully process what happened today.

I was nervous almost to the point of peeing my pants getting driven to school and seriously considered malingering an extra day to bolster my courage. But I knew I couldn't. Something, maybe my intuition, maybe a cosmic message from the universe, was telling me this couldn't wait, that I had to do this here and now. So I got out of the car, slung my backpack over my shoulder, and went in search of Alex. Suddenly I felt deadly confident and not nervous at all - there was this sureness in everything I did and thought. I'll never know where it came from, but there it was, and it was in me and it stayed there until I found myself face-to-face with Alex.

Then, of course, it evaporated and left me right where I started, a stutter-y, clammy blob of romantic fail. Except somehow I opened my mouth and moved around my tongue and made the corresponding shapes with my lips to form the words, "Alex, I have to say something to you." And before I could go on, he said, "I broke up with Delia." At these words, my legs turned to soup and I collapsed on a bench nearby. "Damn," I said, shaking my head slowly, mechanically. "Just...hot...damn." "I know." He exhaled noisily. "Just tell me, did I make the wrong decision?" "No," I said. And that was that.

--

Everything's going so fast. Time. Me and him. Everything. I can't believe it's been almost three weeks since I've written something. But then again, it's not like I really need to anymore. Before him, I did. Before him, I had to write things down or I felt like I was going to go crazy. But now that I have someone to tell them to, it makes all the difference. Such a difference. A world of difference. I'm in another world now.

I love him.

I've always been afraid to say it to myself, so I never did. I'm still afraid, but I can say it now. I love him and he loves me. He said so yesterday; we were downtown and sharing a stick of cotton candy and somewhere in between those fluffy pink layers he said it and the whole world spun and tilted around me like I was on a giant Tilt-a-Whirl, and it was all too much. So I said if we should really use the word love to describe us and he shrugged and said, "How about, I like you intensely?" But that wasn't enough, it sounded tacky and euphemistic to my ears, so I asked him to repeat his first statement and he did, and that time, it was exactly enough.

I love his eyes and his eyelashes and the way his eyelashes stick damply together when his eyes well up from bright lights or too much caffeine or emotion. I love his freckles that are almost completely invisible and the shape of his knees and the smell of his neck. I love that he's one of the only guys I've ever met that likes to cook. I love how we go places; I never realized how little I go out until he started taking me out. I love how he turns on the t.v. before we go out so the furniture is entertained and doesn't start plotting to rise up against the humans and demolish us all - or just so there's noise to greet us when we come home. I love how he's not above having duels with tubes of wrapping paper in WalMart or blowing bubbles with his straw in his glass of coke or double- and triple- and quadruple- dipping. I love how he understands. I love how he moves, like the cadence of a song slow-danced to at an old-school prom you never attended but felt like you did in a past life. I love how we move together. It feels like the ocean. It feels like home.

Of course, he insisted that we wait weeks until we went public with it. But somehow, I'm pretty sure everybody knew about our being an item within days of finding out about him and Delia's break-up. Normally I would feel terrible about this, but not now. I just can't bring myself to feel bad when I feel so good, when all the world and the stores and movie theatres and cafés and bookstores and streets are lit up so brightly.

So many people say how cute we are together. Maynard and the people I'm in the play with. Even Ms. Greenwood. Marina. (I saw her again last weekend. I was so glad we still had things to say to each other and that we picked up pretty much where we left off.)

I'm happy, I'm happier than I could have asked or imagined.