Thursday, May 08, 2003
Every picture has an intro.My office was peach. Good ole 1986, country kitsch, peach. But I did have hardwood floors, thanks to some long ago employee with allergies so bad that carpet couldn't (or wouldn't) be tolerated. And it was in that windowless office, hidden behind a door, thirty feet from Mr. Roger's sweater and Fonzie's leather jacket, that I checked my email at least a hundred times that afternoon.
He was locked away in the Federal Reserve, writing code for some overly complex economics computer program, interpretable by only Alan Greenspan himself or some other faceless semi-important political figure. But every so often I'd get an email. A sentence or two at best. First:"Yeah, we should see each other tonight." Then:"I guess we could meet when I get off work." My replies were all dated thirty seconds after his emails, the frantic actions of a girl trying to pretend like she didn't know what she was doing.
I took the Blue Line. Smithsonian, Federal Triangle, Metro Center, McPherson Square, Farragut West, stopping only once after getting off the up escalator, arriving at street level to a compliment from a beautiful woman who had been commuting with me. "That dress is absolutely gorgeous." "Thanks," I said, feeling almost sure of what I was doing. I walked down 19th, past the World Bank, the homeless sleeping in the park, to my dorm where I would sit on the steps and wait, watching the line for the bus on the corner grow and then shrink, grow and then shrink.
Heather at 8:58 PM
