Four days after my last entry in May, I had a panic attack on the way home and called my roommate to have her help me calm down. Some of it was a caffeine overdose, some of it was that it was really bothering me that she was spending a lot of time with my ex, some of it was just my ex. I called her, and she was at his house. So against my better judgement, I went over there. And had a couple drinks, and calmed down. She went off into his roommate's room. He was drunk, waving around a bottle of Wild Turkey. He told me they were together. My supposed best friend and my ex who I'd only ended things with two months before.

In retrospect, I can understand why he'd do it. There's a quote from Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction that says "If you can't have the one you love...Fuck their roommate." And it's so easy to go from something familiar to something else familiar, especially when you don't have much experience with anything else.

But HER. She was my best friend, or so I thought. She told him all the things I had told her in the confidence that it would be held between us as friends. I was wrong. She lied to me for a month about where she was going. She knew how I felt about them hooking up and she did it anyway.

And so I learned the hard way that some people will stab you in the front. I went home, grabbed as many of my belongings as I could, and went to my parents' house. I only went back once, for the rest of my things and to leave the apartment keys in the mailbox. After that, there was no way I could even look at her again, let alone continue to live with her.

So at the end of may, I found myself living out of boxes in my parents' living room. The only people I knew in Des Moines were my boyfriend Robert, his friend Maggie, and my friend Tiffany who lives out in a suburb and has a job and a kid and not much time for hanging out. It was especially hard because I was still commuting to work back in my college town an hour and a half a day, surrounded by people I no longer felt comfortable around.

It was okay, though. Robert was really supportive. He understood, perhaps instinctively, that there was a lot of scars left by that last relationship with Marko, and he never pressed me about it and was always, always really super nice about my issues with it.

So I turned my attentions to perhaps moving to Minneapolis. And as the time grew closer, and I realized that I wasn't going to be able to get a job without being up there for awhile and I wasn't going to be able to have some place to live up there without a job, I started to rethink things.

I turned in my two weeks notice at Borders, and then, as if a gift from god, saw an ad in the paper for Half Price Books. I had the job two days later. I couldn't have asked for better timing. I found a cute apartment of my own five minutes from downtown. Meanwhile, things with Robert were deteoriating. It's not that we hated each other, it was that whatever had been there vanished. I laid next to him at night and i felt like he could have been anybody.

Sometimes love becomes hate, sometimes it just mellows into friendship.

I broke up with him in mid September.

About a month and a half before that, I had started regularly going to one of the downtown bars several nights a week. I know it makes me sound like a drunkard, but it was never like that. It's a non smoking bar, so I would take my knitting down on sunday nights, talk to Maggie, who bartends there, drink a pitcher of something tasty and talk to whoever came by.

I started to meet some really amazingly great people. And I began to see that what I'd seen as a tragedy was really a much needed kick in the pants. I was miserable in Ames. Here, I was finally happy.

After I broke up with Robert, I was single for a little while and went out with a few boys. I had the best intentions of remaining that way, when I suddenly fell in with a boy named Michael, who took me completely by surprise in October.

It was a girls night out, Maggie, her roommate Bradie, their friend Corrie, and I all hanging out at various bars. Maggie called Mike to bring her a movie she'd been wanting to see, and he came, brought it, and ended up staying to hang around with us. I'd talked to him before, but never really in depth in person. We'd gone back and forth about books via email, but nothing much more than that. We ended up in a booth at Lucky's downtown until 2 am, talking and laughing. The next night we met at Perkins and talked for hours. The next night we went out on an actual date, and ended up in bed.

We've been together for three and a half months now, and I have never been happier. We're a good pair. It's funny. This time the L-word has not been said. And I'm comfortable with that. Honestly, I don't know what love is anymore. I know that I care very very very much for him. And I know that he feels similarly about me. And when he's ready, if he's ready, he can tell me how he feels at his leisure. I'm not going to put a label on anything prematurely.

I just don't want to jinx it.

In short, I'm here, I'm alive, I'm working full time, making scarves and hats and handbags and websites on top of that, spending too much time getting drunk with my real friends, spending too much money on shows, and doting on the most wonderful boy in town.

It's been rough, but I feel charmed.

Look for writing to start up again soon.