Palanan
2014-02-14, 05:59 PM
So, since I don't have any other plans tonight, I'll start.
This is several years ago, involving someone I'd been seeing since the previous summer. It's our first Valentine's together: I wanted to make it a really nice one, a surprise outing with nice touches. I planned the evening in every detail. Reservations a week ahead at a fancy Indian restaurant, nice flowers, a little something chocolate, the works.
And I had the timing worked out to the minute: the Metro home from work, loading up the car, the quick ride through the neighborhood to her house, all of it precisely calculated so I'd pull up just a couple minutes after she came home.
Arrived at her house, 5:34 pm. Flowers, check. Chocolate, check. Car to take her to Indian restaurant, check.
The house is dark and still.
--Okay, fine. Traffic can be tricky, no big deal. I wait a few minutes out front, decide to head back home and give her a little more time.
I return a little past 6:00 pm. The house is dark and still.
...Not great. I was a little taut before, now I'm sliding into worried nerves. Problems on her drive home? I can't fathom why she's not there, but I tell myself she might have had to work a little late, or she might have stopped by the grocery store on her way home--or anything, really. I take the flowers and the chocolate, together with my fraying hopes, back to the car and head back home for a little while longer.
This time I give her plenty of commuting leeway, and come back at 7:00 pm.
The house is dark and still.
--At this point I have no idea what's happened. Should I be worried? I'm certainly worried about the reservations, which have already expired. The flowers are holding up in their little green tubes; my nerves aren't doing nearly so well. I wait, and I wait, and I wait some more.
The house remains dark and still.
A little before 8 pm I finally throw in the towel. I'm starving, the reservations are lost, my sweetie is inexplicably absent and my hoped-for Valentine's evening is officially a crumpled wrapper. I head home, put down the flowers and the chocolate, and send her an email explaining that I'd tried to get together with her but it apparently hadn't worked out.
She replied almost immediately. She was at work.
But not her day job, no; this was her weekend job. Except it wasn't a weekend.
It turned out that because I hadn't mentioned anything special for Valentine's, she had somehow convinced herself that I'd forgotten it entirely and was off doing something else, having fun and ignoring her. In order to keep herself from spending the night alone and depressed, she'd scheduled herself for an extra shift at the grocery store, so she'd be busy and distracted.
By the time her shift was over and she made it back home, all hope of getting a table at the Indian restaurant was long gone. Instead we went to a chintzy retro diner, for reasons of desperate hunger, where I had one of the worst turkey burgers I've ever encountered and her meal wasn't much better. We weren't served until 10 pm, and we were much more focused on bolting our food than sparkling conversation.
Needless to say, there wasn't much of a special mood that night, just dull fatigue and disappointment, tinged with mutual chagrin.
And as a special gift, she later sent me an email explaining that when she wanted flowers or chocolate, she preferred to buy them herself.
:smallannoyed:
This is several years ago, involving someone I'd been seeing since the previous summer. It's our first Valentine's together: I wanted to make it a really nice one, a surprise outing with nice touches. I planned the evening in every detail. Reservations a week ahead at a fancy Indian restaurant, nice flowers, a little something chocolate, the works.
And I had the timing worked out to the minute: the Metro home from work, loading up the car, the quick ride through the neighborhood to her house, all of it precisely calculated so I'd pull up just a couple minutes after she came home.
Arrived at her house, 5:34 pm. Flowers, check. Chocolate, check. Car to take her to Indian restaurant, check.
The house is dark and still.
--Okay, fine. Traffic can be tricky, no big deal. I wait a few minutes out front, decide to head back home and give her a little more time.
I return a little past 6:00 pm. The house is dark and still.
...Not great. I was a little taut before, now I'm sliding into worried nerves. Problems on her drive home? I can't fathom why she's not there, but I tell myself she might have had to work a little late, or she might have stopped by the grocery store on her way home--or anything, really. I take the flowers and the chocolate, together with my fraying hopes, back to the car and head back home for a little while longer.
This time I give her plenty of commuting leeway, and come back at 7:00 pm.
The house is dark and still.
--At this point I have no idea what's happened. Should I be worried? I'm certainly worried about the reservations, which have already expired. The flowers are holding up in their little green tubes; my nerves aren't doing nearly so well. I wait, and I wait, and I wait some more.
The house remains dark and still.
A little before 8 pm I finally throw in the towel. I'm starving, the reservations are lost, my sweetie is inexplicably absent and my hoped-for Valentine's evening is officially a crumpled wrapper. I head home, put down the flowers and the chocolate, and send her an email explaining that I'd tried to get together with her but it apparently hadn't worked out.
She replied almost immediately. She was at work.
But not her day job, no; this was her weekend job. Except it wasn't a weekend.
It turned out that because I hadn't mentioned anything special for Valentine's, she had somehow convinced herself that I'd forgotten it entirely and was off doing something else, having fun and ignoring her. In order to keep herself from spending the night alone and depressed, she'd scheduled herself for an extra shift at the grocery store, so she'd be busy and distracted.
By the time her shift was over and she made it back home, all hope of getting a table at the Indian restaurant was long gone. Instead we went to a chintzy retro diner, for reasons of desperate hunger, where I had one of the worst turkey burgers I've ever encountered and her meal wasn't much better. We weren't served until 10 pm, and we were much more focused on bolting our food than sparkling conversation.
Needless to say, there wasn't much of a special mood that night, just dull fatigue and disappointment, tinged with mutual chagrin.
And as a special gift, she later sent me an email explaining that when she wanted flowers or chocolate, she preferred to buy them herself.
:smallannoyed: