stories about love or something like it

O and C went to college together. Since then he’s always been one of those maybes… the ones that haven’t quite gotten away… the ones that unknowingly rent space in her heart every now and then, only rarely giving a hint of a desire to buy.

Today, he’s has to drop something off at his uncle’s and she’s tagging along. They run into some of O’s friends. While O chats with them, C gets a call from J. O is jealous, though she’s really not in the position to be.

—

M broke up with her boyfriend, who happened to be cheating on her. She was afraid that all her relationships will end this way, that there’s no hope of her finding love that will last, because all her other relationships had ended in betrayal.

She’s since realized that all her exes have had so much baggage, and no clue what they really wanted. It’s still tough going but she’s trying to stay positive.

—

L is feeling dry. He doesn’t know where this relationship is going. He’s always believed that this kind of thing is simply a challenge to keep the fire burning, but now he isn’t not so sure.

They have a talk. Things are back in perspective. There’s a lot of work left to do, but now he’s motivated.

—

C really likes this girl. They live on different continents, but they’ve known each other from when they called the same place home.

Valentine’s is coming up and he wants to send her flowers. He has the plan in place to get her address from her sister. It’s all very exciting.

—

N and G are really close. She likes him a lot, but he has a girlfriend. To make matters worse, there’s another girl that they work with who seems to be putting the moves on G.

N finds it hard to confide in women because she feels they don’t get her like her guy friends do. G is her present confidant and though she treasures their friendship as it is, she really wants more.

because it needs to be written

He was born out of wedlock, but his parents were in love with so much conviction that everything that was “wrong” about their relationship: that they were too young, that his father was younger than his mother, that they didn’t know each other all that well… none of that kept them from getting married.

It wasn’t with quite as much conviction a few years later when his mom emerged as the dominant half of the couple. His dad would be the childish one, who didn’t take many things seriously, and it frustrated and angered his mom. And so she would scream and yell and because he was his father’s son, he got screamed and yelled at too.

It was probably not either one’s fault. They just didn’t fit together as well as they thought, and maybe they didn’t think it was an option to admit it.

Ten or eleven years old, his dad leaves. He’d found someone new. His mom is shattered, but she struggles to keep him fed and clothed and clean. Still, she’s impatient and frustrated and still she screams and yells.

She may have found some peace as a single parent. Maybe she realized that she didn’t need to scream and yell.

It was almost four years that it had been just the two of them, when she died suddenly.

It was a matter of great deliberation for his maternal relatives as to where he would be brought up… with them or with his dad. He agreed that his mom would not want him to live with his dad because his paternal relatives had a tendency to spoil him, but he said that it couldn’t happen because she’d taught him well.

So now he lives with his paternal grandparents. His dad visits every so often. He hardly ever goes to see his mother’s family. When he does, he is distant and seems to be itching to go home. He seems to have changed in the short span of time he’s lived away from them.

On the day they were to bury his mother’s ashes, he asked to reschedule on account of a rehearsal for some school presentation. It was discovered the following week, that there was no such rehearsal.

At a casual dinner out, in honor of a close family friend, when all but two were done eating, he announced that he’d asked to be picked up by his grandfather. His grandfather was to drive about an hour from the area where he lives, pick him up at the restaurant and drive the hour back to the same area, where he was to play video games with an uncle.

—

They’re afraid he’s too old to learn.

You’re never too old to learn and you’re never too old to find a willingness to learn.

If only he knew to look. If only I knew how to tell him.

Help.

story

She worked with him. Probably on the same team. It may have been inevitable that they would grow close.

Who knows when he’d begun to feel differently about her? Who knows when he’d realized she was more special to him than all the other coworkers they hung out with so much? What mattered was that he did and that he told her so.

And she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She wasn’t sure for many months.

Until she almost was. Until all it took was one thing to make her sure.

Why did it have to be leukemia?

—

Epilogue:

It took him a few months after he was diagnosed.

In the months that followed, she found comfort and understanding in his very best friend. And his best friend, in her. And so they have, for three years now.

It seems this is how he would have wanted it to be.

freaky

I am sitting at the bus stop, waiting for a friend to pick me up, drinking a cheap (but good) French Vanilla cappuccino and having a wonderful conversation on the phone.

I turn my head to the left, towards the intersection and there’s this minivan that had just turned right, onto the street in front of me.

The minivan stopped just past the corner, about twenty feet to me left.

I am still talking on the phone and enjoying myself.

There are two middle-aged Asian men in the minivan.

I am probably laughing.

One guy is at the wheel.

One guy has a huge-a** telephoto lens aimed in my direction.

I am in shock.

But I don’t turn away.

For at least five seconds.

Then I do, while frantically trying to relay the proceedings into the phone.

They drive off eventually.

Maybe they wanted a picture of the Cloverfield poster behind me.

Maybe not.

fried chicken

I had a strange dream this morning.

We were in the foyer of a haunted mansion and there were zombies coming down the stairs. An endless flow of zombies and we were without weapons.

But we did have chicken. For some reason, there was a lot of fried chicken on the floor.

So we started aiming the legs and thighs at the zombies, and it worked. They started disappearing.

At some point, we were cramming chicken bits in sandwiches and shoving them in the zombies’ mouths.

I asked one of them, “How many are there of you?” He said about seventy.

Then we were almost out of chicken. Somebody had to run across the street and get more. They came back with chicken-flavored rice.

We sprinkled them over the zombies and that worked too.

Then I think there was a big snake, but that was around the time I was thinking, “This would make a good Avanoo post,” and starting to wake up.