I�m just returned from morning break. When I can, I take my breaks down in the cement courtyard between the art department and the English department, with all its metal and wood sculptures scattered haphazardly about and comfortable chairs, all rained on and dirty. Hardly anybody ever sits down there because it�s not particularly convenient to anything other than solitude. I like it, too, because Jeff (Frances�s husband Jeff) has some of his hidden wood things that I like to spy on still up and around. I like to know about them especially when I think other people who go down there don�t know about them.

Sometimes when I remember that I sort of knew Jeff (or knew about Jeff) before living here, I get a bit disoriented. He went to the same university as me. We even had a class together. It was the very first literature class I�d ever taken�some Women�s Lit. thing. I remember always being shy about saying anything at all in there because I�d never been around people who talked about books and reading the way the people in that class did. That was the only class I did not fail or drop the spring of 1994. I remember how Jeff, who wore his railroad hat and smiled all the damned time, said the smartest things. (Frances, suddenly I must know. When did you live in DC with Jeff? Was it then? The spring of 1994?)

The spring of 1994 was also when I took up smoking. I did this very deliberately and I can�t for the life of me think why. I�d never smoked before. I hated smoking before, in fact. I had a whole string of boyfriends that spring, too. Joe, the 23-year-old who played in a band and was terribly handsome and had a dog. I ditched him on Valentine�s Day to be with Kevin, the fucked up little phony straight-edge kid, a freshman, with really bad skin and stringy dirty hair who, in turn, ditched me to be with Claire, who, in turn loved Dan, my boyfriend after Kevin ditched me. All my friends hated Dan because he talked too much. Dan introduced me to the pleasures of psilocybin mushrooms. Dan was a DJ and the most beautiful boy I have ever kissed. I still have the Valentine he gave me on the day that I ran away from Joe and took up with Kevin. One of those huge gaudy red hearts�he�d stolen it off the cafeteria wall and written something punk on the back for me. I dumped Dan because I loved sfitz and I just couldn�t stand how much I loved him anymore. The night sfitz first kissed me, in somebody else�s bed while the other kids crowded around a hamster cage trying to get the poor thing high, still feels like it just happened�more immediate than last weekend or yesterday or five minutes ago, even. That was the night the only boy I have ever loved first kissed me. Perfectly perfect in every perceivable notion of perfection.

I am such a sentimental sucker. Anybody ever tries to tell you otherwise (including and especially me) lies. I will now shut my yappity trap.

Oh! Except I just remembered how Sue told me when she was here that she ran into Dan at the drug store in DC recently and that he asked about me and told her that I was the one who got away. Ha! I giggle. I�m the one who got away. Don�t you forget it, babies.