Something that became unexpectedly important was where I slept afterwards. A hotel room (smoking) with its paneled elevator, 3am, on the phone with my parents. A day spent in a friend’s studio apartment while she went to the craft mart: I gasped numbly into my fists. The spare room in another apartment during those weeks before the new roommate moved in: we would drag a futon mattress up a flight of stairs and I would curl up here at night in the big empty room under the big open window under the big leafy trees, wrapped in a new down blanket from mom and slipping DVDs of Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2 into my laptop. I had my own key and bought it a ridiculous duck keychain; every so often the button would get stuck and it would quack insistently in my purse until hit.
When her new roommate arrived, I moved to a storage room, which just fit the air mattress I slept on and a framed print of Clint Eastwood pushed against the wall; she and I would make sandwiches from the farmers’ market and I’d remove part of my finger with the bread knife (still numb). When that friend’s husband returned from his travels, I crashed on a couch of our mutual friends. They pinned up a blanket for me to use as a door, and at night I would sneak out for the sake of sneaking out, wandering along the bike trail and listening to the same song on repeat like a teenager.
Break-up lesson #6: sometimes, the wonderful world will catch you.
There was a period of my life during which I watched either Wayne’s World or Wayne’s World 2 every single night, I could say later. I wasn’t happy or sad in the days directly after you. I was just passing time. Iced coffees.  Self-help books. Is it strange to say I miss it.
Last week, Obama came to Portland to speak on healthcare reform (although according to friends who got in, it was more of a brief, comedic act, which at some point caused him to take off his jacket and give all the ladies present heart palpitations). I thought I’d go hang out in the protest for a while, where they were “letting freedom ring” with brass bells.
The next generation has never heard of Friendster.
We were driving into Scarborough to visit Lenny, the world’s only life-size chocolate moose and largest chocolate animal, when I made some kind of grotesque “pththththtbh!” sound and Janaka expressed one of his reserved “heh”s. 
“We joke that you can always tell by the length of the nails.”