I Like To Be...Part 3

So I arrived back in New Haven. I spent three academic years in New Haven and that is quite long enough. It is not an especially pretty town, even with the faux-Gothic splendour of the Yale buildings (at least, most of them - the Art & Architecture building is one of the ugliest edifices anywhere ever, which seems disproportionately the case for Art & Architecture buildings). But after a while the faux- becomes more apparent than the Gothic, probably because I attended a genuine Gothic university. (Which was awful, really - the mad servants and mood lighting I could cope with, but the shrieks in the night from an unidentifiable room do become rather wearing).

I made my way back to the undergrad college where I was a graduate affiliate, and met the guy with the key to my guest room. This guy, my friend Sam, is one of the nicest most adorable people I know and whichever female gets him will be very lucky. Take note of that, because it's one of the few absolutely sincere paragraphs I'll ever write.

So I busied myself for a while, mainly with moisturizing products it has to be said, before returning to one of my favourite New Haven coffee shops for a date. Yes, a genuine date, and all thanks to the wonders of facebook.

What can I say about this date?

Well, what with the disobedient epidermis and PhD qualifying exams and a little depression on the side, it had been a long while since I chatted with somebody for 2 hours. I can barely talk to my family for 2 hours, and not only do I quite like them but we know each other pretty well. He was clearly intelligent and attractive - not classically handsome, but attractive, and desire is a funny beast - and we had things in common and...well, you know where this is going, don't you?

Don't you? Have you not been reading? This was the guy, and - so as not to instill unnecessary suspense - nothing will come of it.

But there was a spark, which was comforting because I'd begun to wonder if I wasn't being too picky. Not that I'm in a position to be picky, but maybe I'd lost all sense of perspective. Ergo, the confirmation that sparks did exist for me, and that I could differentiate between people I liked and people I really liked, was a moment of unalloyed happiness, even if the medium-term result was sadness. Well, maybe not sadness. Perhaps tristesse.

There haven't been many people in my life who generated such a spark. There have been people to whom I could in different circumstances have happily been a boyfriend who didn't strike my flint, as it were. But as my friend Phil says, 'tis better to have loved and lost a short guy than never to have loved a tall.

And then my date had to go to a meeting, and the rest of my Saturday was terribly dull.