I got to talk to Dana last night for the first time in over a week. That hasn’t happened in 12 years, us going 8 days without talking. I needed space and I took it, because she didn’t sound like the Dana I know the last time I talked to her, and I needed to sit in that fact. I needed to sit with the fact that OF COURSE she’s not going to sound the same. We’re not the same kind of people to each other. I just needed her best friend vibe to come through the phone, and it did. We’d been chatting online and I realized what bullshit that was and I called her (LOOK AT ME! I CALLED SOMEONE!). It was then that I realized I would never chat with her online ever again, because it was setting us up for an Argo-like failure in communication to do so. Dana is not a writer. Dana is a talker. I’m never going to get “the real Dana” if we’re writing. So, I think that chat is best used to make appointments to talk and FaceTime and Hangout and Skype. I originally chatted her up to tell her that Pri-Diddy wants to see her and if she has time, would she like to meet with the three of us (Pri-Diddy, her wife Elena- they’re getting married on Saturday, and me)? She said……………. wait for it………….. yes! Not sure about timing because even though we’re both in the area, her parents live over an hour from me by car. We’ll just have to see. But what I know is that Dana’s WANT to see me is more important than the making of the plans.
Oh my Jesus my day got better in a hurry. My Dana. The one for whom my heart beats in a best friend way even if we never reconnect romantically. She makes me laugh like no one in the world, and nowhere was that more apparent than on my front porch last night. She told me what was going on at her work, how “our cats” are doing, and how her friends are. It was just like when we were separated by miles before, when I lived in Houston and she was still in PDX…. except it was better, because she did not get distracted by the TV and start narrating the plot as she was watching. 😛 Seriously, I know the plot to every M*A*S*H episode ever broadcast just from being on the phone with Dana. Her reply to that, and I can predict this one, would be “oh…. come on… you’re exaggerating. Two thirds.”
Everyone in the house thinks that I’m batshit crazy that I want to talk to my ex. They’re straight. They don’t understand that lesbians only have two kinds of breakups…… thermonuclear war and best friends. I hope you guys understand it better than they do, especially my readers who have been with us from the beginning and saw the way we cared for each other before we fell in love. So much that my dad thought the entire reason I was moving back to Portland was for her. It wasn’t, but it quickly became that once I got there because we realized what idiots we’d been for not trusting our friends’ instincts the first time around. Yes, it’s true. Everyone talked about us and we swore up and down that nothing could ever happen between us because we were both too high-maintenance. Hey, that’s a good line. Maybe we should go back to it, D3 (Darling Dangerous Dana).
Now I have to start thinking about what I’m going to get her for her birthday. I am good at this game. I get creative. For her 30th birthday, I went to the Dollar Tree and got her 30 presents. Now she’s going to be 40, which is too young for denture cream and too old for…. wait a minute. Dana’s not too old for anything. Maybe I’ll get her some bath crayons and a rubber ducky. Her shower is white. She could paint that bitch up. 🙂
Technically, I could say that I’ve already gotten her a birthday present because I moved into a house that was already furnished after I’d already bought a TARDIS shower curtain for myself and realized I didn’t have to take it with me. I’m not going to do that to her, though. The “I already got you a present” line is unacceptable. Maybe I will get her a Metro card, tongue in cheek. I am really trying to sell her on DC, because she is so damn happy in Houston that it’s completely irritating to me. We are SO FAR AWAY! Plus, I still remember the days of “I could never live in Houston. It’s TOO HOT.” She visited me in July and it was all downhill from there.
I did, however, tell her that since she makes so damn much money (overtime, bitches. Look into it.) she needed to at least come here more often. Flights on Southwest are so cheap from Hobby to either DCA or IAD that we could meet for lunch for less than $200 if she plans it right. And it’s not like I’ll never go back to Houston, but we would honestly have more fun here because all she’d have to pay for is the flight. All the museums and the Zoo and everything is free. Plus, unsurprisingly, Dana has done a lot in DC, but not THAT much. She didn’t really grow up in the city. She grew up in a town that’s like, 40 minutes away, like growing up in Rosenburg and calling it Houston or growing up in Newberg and calling it Portland. Her hometown is called Dumfries, and I remember telling Dana the first time I met her all those years ago that Dumfries was one of my favorite places in Virginia because it’s the closest Waffle House to Alexandria.
I remember clearly Kathleen and I driving all the way out there because a Waffle House that was far away was better than no Waffle House at all. It’s not the best food in the world, but it tasted like home to us. It’s still the closest Waffle House to me, I think, but even if I took the Metro out to the last NoVa stop and Ubered from there, it would still be the most expensive waffles in history.
The other thing that Dana has never done that we’ll have to plan way in advance but is TOTALLY worth it is that Dana has never been to Manhattan. I want to show her “my NYC.” I’ve been there enough that I know we need to stay at The Time, we need tickets to a show, and we need to eat hot dogs until we explode because NYC hot dogs are really the only ones I like. It doesn’t matter if there are Chicago toppings on it, the hot dog itself is just better.
Trying to think of what color Dana will want at The Time. I am going to leave you with that sentence, because if you don’t know what I mean, you’ll just need to Google it.
Did I mention that I got to talk to Dana last night???????
Stories That Are All True 