Fridays and Saturdays, however, are completely unacceptable choices. No one can live up to that expectation on a first date; why even try? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be dancing.

And on the seventh day we rest. (I need groceries.)

2.) Sweatshirts. I will wear a sweatshirt on my first date with you. Don’t get me wrong: it’ll be clean, I’ll smell nice, I’ll pair it with some tiny pants and tall boots. It’s not even that I don’t mostly own fancier clothing. I could really bust out the big guns and pair a blouse with some pearl earrings and I could sit across from you at the candlelit dinner table all glowingly and hyperventilate all night!

But let’s be clear on this right away: I hate static, cold, and itchiness. Nice outfits are for job interviews; performances; Friday/Saturday nights. I own and often wear sweatshirts.

3.) Make-up. Man, I used to feel really unattractive without make-up. But now I don’t! Isn’t that great?

4.) Eating. I have never understood why first dates so often involve dinner. For one, it’s expensive, and if we’re dating you’re probably poor too. For another, eating is intimate. And not like . . . fun-intimate. It’s weird-intimate. There are all these squelchy and crunch sounds, and sometimes slurping is required. Slurping, for Christ’s sake! Sometimes said slurping splashes stuff. If there’s bread beforehand it’s all up in your chapstick and the crumbs make little dandruffy piles on your lap. Personally, I have poor motor skills and tend to miss my mouth if I’m not concentrating.

So, I propose we do anything but eat together on our first date.

5.) F-bombs. This is something I can do very little about. I will curse like a motherfucker on our first date, especially if we’re around your friends.

This hot chocolate is fucking delicious! Man I love this fucking weather, it’s abso-fucking ridiculous, let’s build the fuck out of a snowman, what do you say? (Cue: fuck yes!)

I don’t know what happens next. Everything has been thrown into the air, scattered, dissected daily. When do I move back in? Or when do I leave entirely? Do we talk today, or take the evening off, think of other things, regroup during the hurricane of some other name? But one thing I can say, is that I sleep through the nights here, and I haven’t been anxious.

So when I got out of the car that afternoon and slammed the door, and realized it would take me an hour by subway to get home, and by then you would all be in Worcester, then Putnam, and that meant I would have . . . at least eight hours to kill — the only solution I could think of, beyond sleeping pills or hallucinatory drugs, was television. True Blood. Cartoons. Madmen. Netflix instant streaming, Made of Honor or some other ridiculous thing.

I opened the door to our apartment.

I tried to elicit sympathy from the cats.

I put down my things, and I sat down on the bed, and I opened my laptop and like a drug fiend got everything meticulously in order, the software installed and the piles of tissues and the plaid pajama pants, and then I thought “no” — and I changed into shorts, filled my water bottle, and strapped on my helmet.

Nearly every time I get on a bicycle, it is with you.

We decide where we want to go today, who will lead, the signals for needing to stop and rest. We pack food and water, or lock up outside grocery stores, movie theaters; we throw our bicycles onto the grass and spread a blanket. The last time we went adventuring, you wanted to reach the Arlington Great Meadows. “We need to stop,” I’d said after forty-five minutes in the July heat. “I’m tired. I want to save some energy for the ride back.” You found us a clearing off the trail, and we spread out our blanket that day and watched a little league game, wondering what the Great Meadows would be like — if we would ever make it there, or if it would just get added to the list of Things We Wished We’d Done When We Lived Here.

I am to girlfriend as terrier is to dog: that is to say, you lead, I follow. Dopily, unquestioningly, because you always know the way, and I like to think of other things. Like the smell of wet grass, or how that man hole looks like an upset monster. You would say later that this is one of the things that bothers you, that you are always the one holding me up and guiding me around, but frankly this is just how I live regardless. Dopily, unquestioningly. I exit trains and follow the masses, I drive and forget to read the signs. I’ll just keep going until I hit a T or leave the state. I’d never pay rent if you didn’t remind me every day, for three days, at the end of every month. The day after we fought, it occurred to me that I didn’t even really know how to get to the bike trail off Mass Ave — and once I was on the bike trail, I had no idea how far away the Great Meadows were, or how I would know once I got there — and I could find all of these answers on Google Maps, in two seconds. Nah. Fuck it.

This is how I live, and it used to feel like a choice I was making, but lately it’s felt like a trap, a neuron path beaten smooth and flawless as new pavement. What is the fastest way to Mass Ave?

I go the first direction my head turns, which is up the hill.

Pedals churn, I switch gears, a cool breeze shifts up cotton short edges, down collar bones. The nice thing about biking is that the scenery is always changing. What is that you say, you have problems? You’re anxious lately and you don’t know why, you’ve felt insulted, misunderstood? Signal left. Keep going, it’s bound to be out there somewhere.

I take Mass Ave all the way into Arlington, and then I finally see the entrance onto the woods of the Minuteman.

I pass the pond with the ducks and swans. Girls with wicker baskets and high schoolers waddling in oversized jerseys. Everyone is walking their little white terrier and no one thinks he needs a leash. A kid rings his bell at me and I ring back (but he doesn’t smile, because kids never act the way they do in movies, especially in Boston). I pass the little league field, the place I took our pictures. I keep going. There is no one on the path any more. The trail leads under stone bridges, their underbellies littered with crushed plastic cups, gashes of graffiti.

Then, plumes of unfamiliar white flowers explode on either side, and suddenly the woods open up, and the horizon melts into an endless sea of green and purple — blue violets swaying in the wind, some ancient house on the top of a hill, slowly peeling white paint. I put on my breaks abruptly, turn around to pull my bike off the trail. I lean against a block of wood only to realize it read “Great Meadows.”

So here it is. Where we didn’t go. The air is clean and good, mosquitos nip at my ankles. There is a sign posted here, nature hikes every third Saturday. Fire pits scar a grassy hill, leaves rustle overhead. And beyond, the endless blue violets. I stand there for a moment and look over it all like some lonely king.

Then I get back on my bicycle and ride and ride and ride until it is dark, I am home.

When I was in college, a animal rights group showed a film teaching us about factory farming and where fur comes from. There was a clip in this film of a mink with its leg caught in a trap; it’s snarling at the camera and flinging dry spit, its body wrangling fiercely in all directions.

This is not how it is constantly, although it could be if one let it. It comes in unexpected bolts, like lightening through the window. Kazzam. One half second and I am writhing in the trap — my heart is racing, the blood drains from my head, I’m dying, I need to get out get out get out! — take a slow, deep breath, and it fades. One minute later, or thirty seconds, or three hours, it may strike again. You take it one bolt at a time.

I’ve also decided, this time around for however long it lasts, to have mantras. Tonight’s is “I am alive, I am good.”

Two simple concepts, that don’t look nearly as comforting typed here, as they feel when you really focus on believing them.

This isn’t fear, I tell myself, it’s reverence.

Which isn’t to say I don’t find it a little ridiculous. I give myself the same look that you do. Come on. Just get in there. This is supposed to be fun. Quit ruining the fun! Or Look at Jamie, in her bikini! She is having fun! Why can’t you be fun like Jamie?

And sometimes I close my eyes and I run into the lake and it feels wonderful and we’re all happy and splashing around and that’s great. Somebody ride the rope swing! Yea! Cannonbaaaaall!

But then, inevitably at some point, I’m standing in the water, staring into it, and I’m thinking about all these grains of sand and the crazy shit that happened to make it sand, the soft piles of decomposing mush and the things that feed on soft piles of decomposing mush, the leeches in the shadows and all the different sizes of fishes and the microbes and the snapping turtles and everything that lives here, everything that’s just trying to get by in the unseeable murk and here I am trampling and splashing all up on its grill.

If you’re not at least a little afraid of entering a lake, I think you must just not have thought about it too much.