Seriously?

When I was 19, I worked at a gas station and dated one of my co-workers, Scott Reynolds. He was 24 and a total player and I fell for him hard. In hindsight, he could have been a great fling, but at that age I didn’t know how not to get attached. I am still working on that one actually. 98% of the time it’s not a problem, but it has happened in the past where I’ve been minding my own business, having fun and not taking anything too seriously, when all of a sudden – WHAM! – I care about someone and they dump me for a 41-year old named Cookie and I whine about it on my blog for months. Anyway, Scott would have been a perfect fling. I am sure my wide-eyed innocence is probably what he was attracted to and if I met him again today, we’d probably both be thinking, ‘What the hell did I see in that person?!’.

But Scott has remained one of the greatest mysteries in my life. I stopped hanging out with him when I left to study abroad. We didn’t really talk about our relationship before I left but we didn’t part on a sour note either. We said that whatever happened while I was gone happened and that we’d see where things were when I got back into town. Good plan, right? Well, when I got home, I tried to get in contact with him but he had dropped off the face of the Earth. And I know right now you are probably thinking that he just didn’t want to be contacted. Maybe. But when I went to my old job they told me he’d gotten shit-faced a week after I left and as a result fell down a flight of stairs and broke his arm, which meant he couldn’t work on cars and he got fired and no one had heard from him since. His phone and his pager were not in service anymore. (1999 remember - people still used pagers then.) I hung out with my other friends from the gas station and Scott really had dropped off the radar. It would have been an awful lot of effort just to avoid me. Still, if that is how the story ended, it would have just been a, ‘Huh, I guess he moved on,’ kind of experience.

But a few months later, my roommates were out of town and it was wicked hot and I was bored and on a whim I tried his phone number to see if it had been reconnected and he answered. Not only did he answer, he seemed really glad to hear from me and asked where my new apartment was and came over within an hour. Then he did something I will never, ever forget. He fixed my air conditioner. It was sweltering out and I was dying and I will be forever in his debt for getting the air conditioner up and running again. (Granted, he only had to reset a fuse, but I had just moved in and didn’t even know where the fuse box was. I can assure you, my technical/mechanical skills have greatly improved since then.) We spent hours talking that night. He looked at all my pictures from studying abroad. He spent more time looking at them then both of my parents combined! We ended up falling asleep together on the couch. No sex, we just talked the entire night. In the morning, he hugged me, said it was good to see me, said that he’d missed me, and then he said that he’d call me later. He left and I never heard from him again. Ever. End of story.

So my question to the opposite sex is – what the fuck? I don’t get it.