Life after Yes

Life after the engagement:

• Drinks. Lots of drinks. Most of them free. I drank more in the following week than I had all year.


• A birthday! Thirty-two was not exciting. I had so many friends come out to dinner that the restaurant said our party was too big and refused to accept our reservation. This was both touching and stressful as I spent the afternoon calling businesses (and failing). We ended up at a fondue place downtown that may or may not be going out of business, according to the rumors.


• Moving into Abraham's. After he slipped the ring on my finger, he told me he'd never let me move in with him without being engaged. So he knew this was happening since we set a move-in date last October. I thanked him for not letting me be a hussy even though I obviously had no qualms about being one.


• The move itself was terrible. Awful. To even write about it would bring back terrors. It was the worst move of my life, including those half dozen college moves where everything I owned was shoved into the back of a pickup truck and I prayed that nothing would fly out into the highway, like someone else's ironing board I just drove over. The sight of U-Haul trucks gives me rage flashes even though that company wasn't even involved in the move. But, as people try to console, the move is over and I get to live with my fiancè. Even though that means ordering parts off the Internet to get my dryer working again because I watched people drop it down a flight of concrete stairs while I screamed helplessly. And now I'm angry all over again.


• Did you see me work in the word "fiancè"? It took us over a week to start using it, similarly to what happened after the initial I love you. It's there but it's still a bit scary, so we'll just not call it by name.

Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice.