ok. i may or may not have been growing a broccoli swamp filled with mold on my roommate’s shelf in the fridge. and i say may or may not because i didn’t actually see the swamp because it was on my roommate’s shelf, and i seriously never look there. nope. i just skim right down to the shelf below it where i keep my hummus, cherry tomatoes and left over spaghetti.
i figure it’s better that way so that i don’t get jealous of food i can’t have, like orange juice and well, i don’t actually know. like i said, i never look at those shelves.
im assuming my soup ended up on her shelf because i had gotten it as a gift back when i couldn’t even do basic tasks like feed myself while recovering from my surgery. and seeing as how i couldn’t feed myself, i also couldn’t do other simple things, like put away food. instead, my mom, sister and grandma were in charge of that. so one of them must have put it on her shelf.
you might have realized by this point, that my surgery was more than a month ago, so that soup must have been at least as old. you’re right. it was. but everyday, id go the fridge and skim right past the broccoli swamp filled with mold to where i keep my hummus.
every. single. day.
until finally my roommate decided that on account of the fact that we were having company, and that there was about a 50 percent chance they would look at her shelf in the fridge, she’d just clean the stupid swamp- and mold-filled container out herself. and seeing as how she’s nice and whatnot, she didn’t even mention it to me, until i was like: hmm? where did this large empty soup container in the dish drain come from? and she was all: oh. that. ya. that was the most disgusting thing i’ve ever done in my whole life. your soup was in there. how could you have not SEEN that?!
what? it was? crap. wow.
my friend robert from high school was like that soup.
we were bestest friends back then. back in 2000. and 2001.
and we’d go to off-campus lunch together like every single day. to mcdonald’s. or taco bell. or even that little gyro place where i used to get gyros from until i got food poisoning from them.
and i remember one time someone stole his coveted parking sticker from inside his car, and we walked up and down the hundreds of cars in the my school parking lot looking for it. for like a week. and i thought it was a hopeless endeavor because holy automobile, there were like 1,472 cars in that parking lot. but robert was so cool, that i walked along the rows just so i could spend time with him.
and then one day he found a sticker with a number that had been altered with white out, and i’ll be darned if it wasn’t HIS parking sticker.
and even though we had so much fun together, doing even simple things like walking through a high school parking lot looking for his sticker, we never dated.
and we didn’t even go to prom together or anything. instead, we both went with people we thought we wanted to go with. and then, while at the dance, we both ditched our dates and hung out all night laughing.
robert always made me laugh. the boy would crack me up. and i can’t even remember a single joke, but i vividly remember the laughing.
and then on graduation day, he came up to me after the ceremony, grabbed my arm and said ‘im going to college on the east coast. what if we never see each other again?’ and i was like ‘that’s crazy. of course we’ll see each other again.’
but of course we never did.
and i still wonder if maybe we were meant for each other. or maybe we were at least meant to see if we were meant for eachother. but we never got that chance. because even though we hung out everyday. i never saw him. like that soup in the fridge, i just skimmed right past him. and dated a bunch of losers instead.
and i often wonder how many amazing people are in my life who i just skim right past. how many people are right there in front of me who i never even see?
