Day 14: Close Encounters. (207)

I found pot in the house tonight.

Well, not pot, exactly, but this stuff a former friend of mine called "rebound" - what's left in the bowl after you smoke pot through a vaporizer. It's not nearly as strong as good sticky bud (or even ditch weed), but it'll get you high in a pinch. (A vaporizer, by the way, is this nifty little contraption that sucks the THC out of the leaves without actually burning them, meaning you inhale no smoke whatsoever. I'd never heard of one before, but after I tried it, I couldn't understand why every smoker on the planet doesn't use one. It leaves your mouth tasting like Autumn. In fact, if I hadn't quit smoking, a vaporizer was on my wish list.)

Anyway, I stumbled across this little film canister of rebound in my living room, hidden away where I'd forgotten about it. I'd stashed it about a month ago, soon after the former friend in question turned out to be, well ...

I should start at the beginning.

Back in July, Heather had posted an ad on Craig's List (www.craigslist.com), a very cool bulletin board site where you can find everything from a box of 100 eight-track tapes (the "Free Stuff" section) to an "ex-porn star with a huge package" (Casual Encounters). Heather's post, in Women Seeking Women, was long but unusually intelligent, and I replied with something that was (I'm sure) devastatingly witty. There was only one part of her ad that was a Red Flag: "Size 6." I moved forward anyway.

After several banter-filled emails and a few promising phone calls, we decided to meet, and I have to say, her looks pretty much blew me away. Blonde, blue-eyed and (as forewarned) slender, she was a casual-cotton and linen girl with an earthy edge. I loved the way she moved, the way she talked, the way she laughed ...

I was instantly infatuated.

I had no idea how Heather felt, but that first night we met, we stayed up until five in the morning talking, and she wound up sleeping on the couch. We polished off a bottle of wine, smoked way too much reefer (which would become a pattern) and fell into one effortless conversation after another.

The next few weeks were all about Heather. We spent four or five nights a week together, and I drove my friends insane talking about her and wondering if she liked me "that way." I obsessed over everything. When she said I was unlike anyone she'd ever met, did that mean she was into me? When she touched my arm, was that a signal? When she said she didn't find skinny girls attractive, was that a message? When she emailed me a song in which the narrator encourages the listener to "lay your body down/ listen to my voice, the only sound/ let me lullaby you down," was she talking to me?

And so it went, until finally, one night, I couldn't take another minute. It was 3:30 a.m., we were standing out by the cars in my driveway, and I just went for it. I kissed her. She responded, and the next five minutes were sheer bliss.

And then I didn't hear from her for three days. Like all obsessed people, I figured she had to have been injured in a car accident, or, barring vehicular misfortune, mugged. Either way, she was in the hospital, and, quite clearly, unable to reach me. My housemate, meanwhile, was brutally honest ("Sorry Karen, she's not into you"). I refused to believe it.

Sure enough, Heather surfaced with an email (the first real sign, other than disappearing, that she was fucked up) saying she didn't want to take our relationship to the "next level," at least not "right now." I was crushed, but somehow managed to remain optimistic. We pushed through the awkwardness and continued to grow closer over the next six weeks. We even went away for the weekend together (to her family's cabin in the mountains), and, after mutually agreeing that all lesbian films sucked, began working on a screenplay idea.

I suppose the end was inevitable. I was stuffing my romantic feelings in the hope that whatever was behind that makeout session would return, and Heather, well ... who knows what the hell Heather was doing. Part of me thinks she was interested in me romantically but couldn't get past my weight. Part of me thinks she was smitten by my disarming intellect (yes, I'm laughing) and couldn't tear herself away. Another part thinks she was using me (at least a little) to learn the screenwriting ropes. Maybe it was some combination of the three.

Anyway, after three months and a ridiculous amount of time together, the entire relationship collapsed over the course of a one-hour phone call. What went wrong? Put simply, she'd chosen to go out of town on the spur of the moment at a time when she knew I needed her, and then she blew off meeting two very close friends of mine who (separately) visited town. My feelings were hurt, and so, when she blew off meeting the second friend, I called her on it.

It didn't go well. My voice trembled with truth as the floodgates fell, and she had no idea how to respond. She reflexively went on the defensive, but once I'd decided to stop holding back, it was like shooting a slow-moving fish in a very small barrel.

I knew it was over before we hung up. I'd known Heather was a narcissist for weeks and ignored it (the sentence "Every guy I meet hits on me" had come out of her mouth not once but twice), and now, that was no longer possible. She wasn't a bad person, but even though she was fun and sincere and truly cared about me as well as she knew how, she was completely self-involved. There were a few emails after that phone call, but when I said I wanted to step back from the screenwriting project, her true colors bled through. She wrote that we could no longer be friends because I wasn't a rational or caring person. I haven't heard from her since.

I doubt I'll ever speak to Heather again, but I suppose that's what happens when you're shallow enough to focus on physicality and turn a blind eye to Red Flags. Like so many people who battle low self-esteem, I was willing to stifle it if someone as attractive as Heather was (or could be) romantically interested in me. If people saw me with Heather, it would cancel out my weight. Cancel out my perceived lack of graceful femininity. Cancel out any and all self-loathing.

It wouldn't have, of course, and I should have known better. My behavior wasn't fair to me or to her.

Oh, and as for the rebound? I dumped it in the garbage ... which felt good on more than one level.