Sliding Doors

Today I walked upstairs to our “canteen,” as they call it here, someplace I hardly ever go because I choose to get lunch elsewhere. There’s a coffee bar there, its counter lined with glass jars of cookies: sugar, sugar with M&Ms, chocolate chip.

I tried not to look at them too closely, or to notice what, exactly, is in the ice cream freezer during these binge-susceptible days. But I could see myself clearly eight months ago (for the record, today marks weight months of This Thing I’m Doing), wondering if I dared buy them yet again, and probably cramming them in my mouth on the stairwell, hoping I wouldn’t bump into anybody. It’s been an unusually cool and rainy summer in London, but I could see myself, hot and lethargic and disgusted on a Friday afternoon where I don’t have plans for the evening, gearing up for a binge.

The doors clicked shut. I bought my diet Coke (I’m drinking it occasionally these days) and banana.

* * *

Last night I went out with the English lawyer. The first part of the evening was fun, though nerve-wracking in that way it can be when so much time has elapsed since the first time you met that you can barely remember what he looks like (less cute and did you really not notice his teeth?), yet you’ve exchanged so much e-mail that your virtual relationship is ridiculously far ahead of your actual one. (I learned that last bit the hard way during my brief experience with online dating a few years ago, but how quickly I forget.)

I’m shy about swapping intimate details with even my closest friends, so I’m going to be deliberately vague here, but… He got sick at an extraordinarily odd, ill-timed moment – a moment that just seems ripe for some kind of punch line, if only I could come up with it. For several reasons – namely several glasses of Rioja without food, in that time-honored British date tradition – it wasn’t my finest hour, either. When he texted to apologize – very sheepishly – today, I proposed we call it a draw. He sent an e-mail saying he’d left “the worst possible impression” and that maybe it has more to do with injury to his ego, but that he wasn’t sure how that “figures through with things,” and that he needed to think about it.

I think that’s the end of that one. Door No. 2 closed. Going out with the internet consultant tomorrow night. Suddenly the fact that his e-mails are short and confined to logistics of meeting up seems quite the plus.