Game day.

It's raining pretty hard, so I might opt for a lightweight skirt instead of the standard water-absorbing jeans. Which makes me wonder if I'll be the only girl at the park wearing a skirt. Do they let you watch baseball in a skirt?

Forgive me, I'm a little out of practice. And a little nervous. 'Cause I've got to buy the perfect cap and find one incredibly perfect hot dog and manage to snap some interesting i-zone pictures in-between.

Because believe it or not, there's a lot riding on this. In the most teasingly fun way.

He knows my friends from the way their names litter these pages and pop up into our conversations. They are at once completely familiar and romantically mysterious. And at times strange names creep up and he pauses and inquires and new stories unfold.

While I was in Spain I wrote to him about Melanie, describing her passion and sweet humor and life lust and challenging inquisitiveness. I told him about one perfect day we spent walking her Manhattan streets on the Upper West Side. Autumn sweaters and roasted nut vendors. About random palm readings and transcribing our brand new futures onto MOMA napkins over coffee and apples.

Everyone should have a Melanie. Someone who floats, even regretfully at times, on the periphery of your life, but who carves every shared moment like deep, orange canyons in your soul. With whom laughing at 5am about artichokes is completely natural. Who makes taking 25 minutes to order buttered toast at a diner the norm.

And before tonight I hadn't really talked to Melanie in the lifetime of a year or so. Her move to Idaho, my move to DC, a few scattered emails over these changing months. But we didn't miss a beat. It was at once poignant and hysterical and as comfortable as a childhood Saturday afternoon. My whirlwind romance and her upcoming move to Palo Alto woven together with memories and confessions and so so much laughter.

And now I'm dreaming of melon soup at the authentic Palo Alto Chinese restaurants and what we can find to occupy our Saturday nights until they deliver the Sunday paper. Reconnecting under a warm and perfect California sun with a unique and important old friend.

Two glasses of Merlot and the never ending wall of noise, guitar riff after riff, at the end of "Wow" combined to give me an out-of-body experience.

Eyes closed, head tossed back, arms swinging alongside my swaying body. Intense. Perfect. In tune with something much bigger than me.

In other words, exactly what the doctor ordered.

There's a little slip of paper on my desk that reads "concubine, sharing a wave with a child, in bed by 11:30, starry soap". Things that once-upon-a-time seemed important enough to share.

But right now my mind only throbs with the closing of a tiny white window and my ears ring with the white noise silence of a disconnected telephone call. And all my stories have fallen from me, lost and silly. Without meaning.