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Prosies







< ? bostonites # >

Tonight is Women Reading. I went last month, but was too late to read. This month, I'm getting there on time, thank you very much.

Annalisa's birthday was yesterday. She celebrated the big three-oh at Pho Republique in the South End. It was the trendiest Vietnamese restaurant I've ever been to. I spent time chatting with software developers and marketing executives. It was all so young-urban-professional, and it took me a while to realize that I was fitting right in without even thinking about it. The cake was thick with frosting-roses, and Matte and Laura had set the table with these little monkeys on sticks that moved up and down on a lever.

On the Evite, I'd mentioned that I would try to bring Quick, and three or four people I'd never met before asked me where she was—it took me quite by surprise, considering everything that's happened in the last week.

I finally got a chance to talk with Ashtanga, a friend of Annalisa's whom I'd met a few months ago at one of those paint-your-own-pottery places. It's a shame she's going back to Ireland in 10 days; I would have liked to have known her better.

I left the party at about 10:15 and walked all the way back to my car in Cambridge. It was a cool, early-spring evening, and the city lay out there before me like a jewel, one that kept changing and turning as I passed through it. From the South End past the brownstones, up Tremont Street and over the highway, through downtown, through the Boston Garden and past the drained lake... up Charles Street past all the shi-shi shops, the windows full of table lamps, linens, and pearls, past the bums sleeping in doorways, over the dangerous intersection of Storrow and Cambridge Street, and then across the Longfellow Bridge... the financial district rising behind me, the blue-lattice work of the new bridge in the North, the low spark of the Back Bay, and the Citgo Sign near Kenmore Square that used to mean home to me.

Used to mean home.

Quick and I have been talking again, "through the little guy," as she calls MSN Messenger. I stopped by yesterday to give Morris his IV injection and pick up some underwear—after calling to let her know I was coming, so she could leave. This was on the way back from signing my new lease, which begins on September 1.

Quick's asked me to keep my options open, to slow down. We've been together for so long, she says, she can't believe I'm taking all these actions so quickly. That hard core of anger inside me has softened a bit, but I still need to keep moving forward, too. I don't want to hurt her any more than necessary, but I'm not sure that slowing down is going to help, or if it'll only draw out the pain.