I Can Barely Take Care of Myself by Jen Kirkman Page B

Party! At the usual place—Sardo’s in Burbank.” Interestingly, nobody wrote back to say, “What the hell are youtalking about? Wedon’t have a regular karaoke night. Are you trying to get something going with a boy?”
    Matt showed up. I sang my usual karaoke song, Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart”—if you ever see me sing that song at karaoke, it means I’m trying to impress you. And if you’re a cute boy, it means I’m trying to get you to impress your penis on me.
    Later Matt sang a nervous rendition of “Brandy (You’re a FineGirl)” by Looking Glass. Eventually we were the last ones there. It was like our friends and the patrons of Sardo’s were trying to make the decision for us. Come on, you two, make a move already!
    You know when you want to make out with someone and you’re pretty sure that he wants to make out with you because you’re both touching each other’s arms? You think to yourself, This is Body Language 101. He’s touching my arm because he knows it’s sending me a signal that he’s interested. But wait, who would be so obvious and actually touch someone’s arm? He’s not reading Cosmo. Maybe he touches everyone’s arm. I’ve never hung out with him before. That could be his “thing.” I better not act on this and ask him if he wants to leave and go somewhere else. Nope. His flirtation is so by-the-book that I’m suspicious. We should just keep sitting knee to knee in this booth and ignoring the fact that we are blind to everyone else at our table but each other.
    Eventually he walked me to my car because he is a gentleman and because my car was right next to his.
    We started talking and talking . . . and talking, because it was easier than one of us making the awkward first move. I offered super-smoothly,“Hey, so, if we’re going to keep talking, we might as well sit in my car. It’s cold.” It wasn’t cold. Matt got in the front seat and I immediately pounced on him. He flinched. When we talked about it later he said that it just seemed like I was about to hit him. To be fair, I do have a lot of testosterone and I did come at him like a flying squirrel, but I landed like a butterfly andfound myself having my first kiss with the man who would become my husband. (I mean, not that night, although there was a ceremony of sorts when Matt had to pee in between our cars.)
    The whole next day I tried to remember what song he had sung at karaoke so I could buy it, but I didn’t want to ask him what the song was because I knew that if you asked a guy what song he sang at karaoke, he wouldknow you’re planning to buy it and listen to it over and over while reimagining your first kiss. I was thirty, but I was not naive.
    Matt and I spent the next week fucking off at our day jobs and e-mailing each other all day instead—those types of stories that you’ve told a million times and can’t wait to have a new audience for. He told me his favorite childhood memory about the time his middleschool gym teacher murdered his wife and claimed that the blood on the walls was marinara sauce. I reminisced about the time that a priest at our church wore a lavaliere microphone and ranted in his Sunday sermon about how gay people were destroying parades because they throw condoms off floats and into the street, and he let out a fart under his robe that was amplified through the speakers thathung next to the stations of the cross on the sides of the church.
    I don’t know why that happens—that when you’re hanging out with someone you know you’re going to fall in love with, you just don’t know where to begin and you start picking up pieces of your life as though they’re old photos randomly gathered in a box and handing them over to a virtual stranger for safekeeping. It’s like saying,“Here. I’m excited and hopeful and I don’t know where to begin but I think one day we’ll eventually have enough time to unpack this thing and make some sense of it all.”
    When the Red