On Post: Girlfriend is Better

Date: January 25, 2013

Find it here http://timstevensisungajje.com/the-january-project/2013/01/january-25-2013-girlfriend-is-better.html

The sight of the almost memory, the next day. (picture from http://www.flickr.com/groups/966335@N25/pool/?view=lg) P.S. evidently tent dances are a thing of the past at my alma mater. That's a shame. — The sight of the almost memory, the next day. (picture from http://www.flickr.com/groups/966335@N25/pool/?view=lg) P.S. evidently tent dances are a thing of the past at my alma mater. That's a shame.

I think we’ve either all been here or know someone who was here. Dumped, still in love with the man/boy or woman/girl who dumped us, and so blinded by it that no one else’s charms can seem to break through.

I think I’ve probably been guilty of it myself. Freshman year of college, still nursing a heart broken just before high school graduation. My campus, like most college campuses, was filled with attractive women, but I was like…shut down, maybe?

I have a specific image in my mind, of a tent dance, late fall, that this story is set at/in. I totally have no memory of being in such a situation myself and yet…the story evokes something for me. It’s a sense memory for something I never experienced, if that makes a lick of sense. In attitude, I was so close to Gavin, so hung up on the girl that dumped me, that I know if I had been in that situation, I probably would’ve reacted the same. And it would’ve been just as dumb. So, again, not my memory, not an event of my life. But in writing it, it felt so much like I was then, that it felt like the unearthing of something I had forgotten.