Kuffel - Love sick a memoir of searching for Mr. Good Enough

One

Penguin couples spend their lives apart from each other and meet once a year in late March, after traveling as far as seventy miles inlandon foot or sliding on their belliesto reach the breeding site.

April

We are in Santa Fe to find a ghost. It is also, as he and I had discussed in a wearying back-and-forth series of phone calls and emails, my audition as Dars girlfriend and, seven thousand feet higher than where we started out in Phoenix, we were breathless in all the wrong ways. Instead of canoodling our ghost into rearranging the furniture, I slept fitfully as the television murmured and flickered through a marathon of Sasuke. In the end, our only haunting is that Need You Now is on every radio station between Santa Fe and Phoenix, which is annoying but also fitting as we sit in the car outside his house having the Talk.

It is becoming more and more obvious that men are oblivious to what Friends with Benefits can start for a woman.

I love you, he begins. We have a lot in common. You know, the whole lit thing, and dogs, and a general sort of outlook on stuff. But then again, there are things that are important to me that we dont have in common. I dont know whether its best to be with someone with whom you have everything in common or not. I had a girlfriend like that once, but the minute she came to visit me, I knew it was all wrong...

So I dunno. One thing is that youre not exactly easygoing. You dont always relax and go with the flow. I mean, you never know what could happen, I spose. I could wake up one day and be in love with you. But Im not now and I dont want to do anything that would jeopardize our friendship. That means a lot to me. You know that, right?

I blow my nose in answer. I want out of his car. I want to get into my car, which is parked in his garage, and I want to drive to my fathers house, get on the plane to New York the next morning, retrieve my dog from my friends Ben and Jean and tell them what didnt happen and then hold a weepy funeral with the mostly faithful love of Daisy, an ill-behaved, too-smart-for-her-own-good yellow Labrador, in the solitude of the Bat Cave. Dontsay anything, one part of me warns. Have some dignity.

Okay. I hiccup and open the door. I guess thats that. I gotta go.

He hugs me good-bye, an awkward bear hug in which I pat his back as though consoling him.

Im so sick of this bullshit, I think.

I should have known, I think as the Midwest skeins me away from Dar. I should have known when I was late meeting him in Phoenix for the drive to New Mexico. I should have known when I found myself biting my lips in an ugly frown against my grinding jaw, that I was too tense, too scared to be girlfriend material.