earlier this week, paul reminded me that tomorrow marks twelve years that he and i have been making out with one another.

twelve… 1-2… 12… TWELVE!

yes, he remembers anniversaries better than i do. he remembers a lot of things better than i do.

come to think of it, paul’s kind of like a vault that occasionally cracks open when you get the combination correct and then busts out with some random nugget of knowledge… or in this case, a reminder of when he and i began dating.

he remembers the movie we saw on our first date. i don’t. i know that there was fire in it. i actually missed a good chunk of the movie because i spent an obscene amount of time in the bathroom that evening.

the part of our date that i remember vividly, other than it sucking, is my contact lens getting stuck in the top of my eye. like UP on the white part of your eyeball and you try to ::BLINK:: to get it to move down but your eyelid is being a bitch and fighting you with each ::BLINK:: and then your eyes start to tear up but not because you’re crying at the stupid fire movie you’re watching, but because you have a circular piece of plastic that was made to correct your vision STUCK ON TOP OF YOUR EYEBALL and unwilling to move.

i spent what felt like hours in that bathroom, splashing my face with water, attempting to get some in my eye so that it would somehow swish my contact lens around and magically conform to my eye the way it’s supposed to.

after a few minutes of failing at that, i had to do one of the things i hate the most… i had to TOUCH MY EYE. and sweet mother of all things disgusting that gives me the itchies in my soul, I HATE TOUCHING MY EYE.

alas, i had no choice nor any saline solution in the movie theater bathroom. i touched my eye, removed the bitch of a contact lens, and saw that the lens had flipped itself inside out.

(remember that lesson in science class about concave and convex lenses? i should’ve paid more attention to that.)

i toss the contact lens in the trash can, pinch my cheeks in the hopes of looking like i still have a little bit of blush on even though i washed it all off during my battle with my contact lens.

it then dawns on me that the amount of time i spent in that movie theater bathroom was the exact equivalent of the amount of time one spends in a public restroom when one has explosive diarrhea.

“paul is totally thinking i diarrheared myself during our first date. of course he would think i diarrheaed myself this whole time because i have been in here FOR-EV-ER.”

i wanted to die. i didn’t die (obviously) but i wanted to at that moment in time.

(it should be noted that years later, when i finished grad school, my parents asked me what i wanted as a gift to mark the accomplishment of getting my master’s degree. i asked for lasik eye surgery.)

paul does not recall the contact lens of death drama that occurred that evening. he was watching a movie about fire and totally plotting how he would make out with me by the end of the night (which he didn’t because the date sucked and i don’t put out on dates that cause me to jab my own fingers in my eye.)

the night of my first date with paul ended excessively early. i had a lame curfew and paul had a loud-ass jeep wrangler that irritated the hell out of me for years because of the stupid noise those cheap plastic windows make that ultimately keep one from having any sort of conversation while driving.

i’m convinced jeep wranglers were invented just to piss excessively verbal people, like me, off.

also, that night, after throwing away my contact lens in the movie theater bathroom, i could only half see which was an odd experience and gave me a craptastic headache.

WHATEVER! I HAD TO TOUCH MY EYEBALL, PEOPLE! IT WAS TRAUMATIC!

happy 12 years, my love! let’s make out.