pardon my rudeness

One of my near and dears from the Kent days has a brother who stopped up unexpectedly to visit me as he's doing research on Fair Clevelandia these days for a thesis so we hung out in the courtyard by the cathedral and talked such things as relate to cities.

And then I'm walking home and I hear my name called from an apartment window. It's a friend of my previous roommate, someone I barely knew as an acquaintance and haven't seen in a couple years, given that he's graduated and me and her no longer hang out. After the initial "hey we're neighbors" and how've you beens, it suddenly turns to can-I-make-you-dinner, let's drink some wine, my roommate's not home, and I'm caught completely off guard but I want to get to art class so I say later at first thinking well of course who wants to eat dinner alone, but as I'm dusting green enamel on the copper plates, I realize that the whole exchange of half an hour ago is completely weird, that the reason of his sudden moving to this side of town may or may not have to do with a relationship that ended, and that showing up after class later on in the night is probably a very bad idea and for lack of other options, I'm just going to pretend the whole interaction didn't happen.

So I kill time in Lakewood, walking around the park, sitting by the glassy lake watching the geese and the swallows, work in the garden til sunset, come home to let the phone ring, because I don't want to talk, I don't want to deal with this. We live three houses away, so I'll have to eventually, but there are other things to do, so I let it be, because this is not how I do things, this is not what I want. I don't want token gestures of chivalry and romance, from someone who barely knows me, if I want anything, it's camaraderie and naturalness and some kind of foundation other than hormones and loneliness. I don't know why this and other things kind of make me mad but they do.