The rug in the waiting room for my therapist is absolutely ridiculous. At first glance, of course, it seems tasteful enough: it’s of the mossy green oriental variety, with a mauve and gold floral pattern, the curves and cream colors of which are inoffensive and largely unnoticeable. It’s not the kind of rug you would think to stare at, unless, say, you were placed into a waiting room with nothing to read except People magazine.

It was my first visit there, over a year ago now, that I realized that the rug in my therapist’s waiting room was surrounded by pure, unadulterated sex. A long-time ground-starer, I picked it up immediately, even through eyes blurred with self-pitying and confused tears. I had just emerged from the cave. I was only beginning to recognize that the darkness had been darkness.

Legs: everywhere was a naked pair of spread-eagled, spreadedy spreaded, sexy female legs. A woman’s head seemed to peak up between them from a slight distance, as if to say “hello, down there.”

“Bwah hah,” I chortled.

The thing is, the design actually manages to be even more pornographic than that (and a pair of spread legs, repeated some twenty times all around the border of the rug would really be enough for me, outside of a brothel). But the inside of each thigh is multicolored in a layered pattern which, I kid you not, is somehow . . . a vulva. You could teach sex-ed with these legs, how to insert a tampon, where girls pee. They each have their own freaking clitoris. Thighs, people. Vagina thighs. And if that’s enough to make you question your sexual orientation, just wait; at the end of each leg seems to be an alarming spiked high heel, which after some analysis can make the design appear to actually be two sperm, meeting heads for a kiss. Hot, right?

“Hi Adrianne!” my therapist chirps every other Monday at six as she opens her door. It makes a shhhhsh sound over the rug, and she steps smilingly onto a vulva thigh sperm. “So. What’s new?”

I’ve realized the problem I have with taking pictures (ie: “creating memories”): I so rarely remember to take them when things are actually happening. I tend to forget that I have a camera with me at all, until the moment that I’m just waiting around for something.

And so, to go with a theme, a few pictures of waiting.

Sometimes technology lets you down.

You know, that picture you take.

Midnight cookies and mischief.

Incidentally, I bet this post totally pumps Todd and Ruth up for the fact that I agreed to help document their wedding ceremony.

I can’t remember how we got to Chicago. Is that strange?

Granted, it’s been six years now, and granted, there were, as I recall, a number of transportation methods involved after we arrived: taking the El into the city, biking around Emily’s neighborhood, driving her car to Little Rock and then Memphis. We set up tents in the dark and woke up early, cold and soaked in dew. We clambered up boulders, snuck into blues clubs full of white people, gobbled barbecue soaked with the kind of thick, penetrating sauce meant to really settle into flesh — it wouldn’t leave your own fingers for days, and you began to view your body as not so different, really, from that previous pig’s.

But we started in the middle of no where, New York: why do my memories begin in her house (down to the large sleepy cat named Panda and a bike ride across an old wooden bridge) and not on a plane (the adrenaline coursing with lift-off, the promise of new friendships forged in travel)? It’s the strangest thing.

And, perhaps, even stranger, how can they end there — as if I never returned?

When I first heard that song I thought it was amazing. Affirming and mature, something on a similar level, to, say, “I Will Survive,” but with less anger: that reassuring, everything will be all right reggae beat that I simply will not tolerate in anything else. Even to this day when I hear “No Woman No Cry” my first, gut reaction to it is to go with it, acquiesce: if you don’t have a woman, you won’t cry. Relationships, I was realizing that freshman year in college, are complicated, hard work, and occasionally pain.

It was a particularly sordid year for me as far as romance was concerned: I was flitting all over campus kissing and claiming devotion to anything that moved. Keep in mind that at the time, I also technically had a boyfriend at home. It’s not a period of time I’m really proud of.

But karma is karma, and I’ve noticed that bouts of being terrible and flippant with other people’s emotions are accompanied by a sudden, intense infatuation: the comeuppance. Enter freshman Andrew. I fell hard, fast, the minute he interrupted our first and last kiss by answering his cell phone. He proceeded to have a very glum, awkward sort of conversation, and I sat in his room uncertain what to do with myself. The call finally ended.

“So,” he said after a moment, “well, that was . . . kind of . . . my girlfriend.”

“HAH!” I responded.

What followed was the first time in my life that I actively pursued someone who I knew was “taken.” It didn’t strike me as a problem, somehow, because I was so awesome. What was immoral about that? Anyway, I wasn’t a real threat, like those sexy ladies are, with their trickery and hips. I once half-joked half-cried to my mother on the phone that I was trying to seduce someone away from his girlfriend, and she sighed “Oh, Adrianne. You’re not going to seduce anyone.”

Time passed. I wasn’t even looking at anyone else any more, I was obsessed. Finally I desperately pulled him aside, throat tightening, hair wild. Something had to be done. I couldn’t take this one-person-on-my-mind thing, it was craziness.

“Hey,” I said. “Look, I just want you to know that, you know, that I really like you, and, I broke up with my boyfriend, so, you know, I’m here.” I was in the habit of frank discussions like these. High school had taught me that there was nothing frightening whatsoever about rejection: it allowed you to move on. The scary part was if they liked you back.

So thankfully, Andrew rejected me then, saying something about needing some time to think about everything, he was really busy lately, and he really didn’t know if he wanted to be in a relationship at all, etc. etc. My memory of what he said is pretty hazy at this point, but I remember exactly, precisely, verbatim, what I said next.

“I understand completely,” I smiled, almost relieved. “No woman, no cry, right?”

He gave me a slow, confused nod, as if he were about to ask a question, but decided against it. Then he left. And I wouldn’t know the real meaning of that song until last summer.