My hair looks awesome today.

There is one thing left to think when you don’t want to think about how you were just caught making out with your boyfriend’s best friend, and it is not: I wasn’t that into it. That is in fact the last thing you want to think when you get caught breaking the man you love’s heart, in the most trite, trashy-TV re-run sort of way.

And if you aren’t going to think about all the ways the man you love moved slowly away from you, withdrew into band practices for shows he would never play or studying for classes he would never finish or simply just smoking up with friends that flew in from exotic locales like Bowling Green, Ohio and Poughkeepsie, NY just to smoke in the living room of the apartment you have both lived in for the past nine months; you definitely shouldn’t think about the way you used to be, back when you met in that hip-hop dance class he took on a dare from a colleague and you took because you wanted to be able to move like Beyonce, or at least like one of her far-back-stage backup dancers.

Because back in that class when you were both looking as stupid as possible in front of each other and the very fit, very pretty, very Beyonce-jointed instructor who probably had more important things to do than watch a bunch of stiff white people try to move with some rhythm for three hours every week for six weeks, you fell in real love. The kind of love it takes lifetimes to access and build, because there is so much fear and stiffness to work out before two people can show their true colors with confidence. Failing to pop and lock and booty bump bonded you both in ways no one else could understand, least of all the jerks he worked with at Ernst and Young who spent their time drinking and making money for other people to buy them off with. Or the artists you tried to befriend while working as a receptionist in the Medical District and the coffeeshop and the writing center and the experimental theater/screenprinting studio. Unless those people were ever in real love, they just weren’t going to get it.

And since you can’t dwell on how much momentum you two built up, and how it lasted months after class ended, and brightened your heart in the dark days of the day-job grind and gave him hope that he could maybe do other cool stuff in his life that didn’t involve sucking up to someone all the time, and maybe you could actually make and keep friends that were not another carbon copy of a carbon copy of an idea of a successful art kid in the city. The talking, the kissing, the hanging out and laughing and spending all night playing board games or planning road trips...all that has to be put right out of your mind.

And since you can’t bear to think of how he slowly gave up on anything but giving in, or how gave up on getting through to him and didn’t know how to end things gracefully or if you even should because what would it mean if you let this person go, who is supposed to be the proof in the pudding that people are people are people no matter what mold they try to form themselves to, and people need people, and people like him could be with people like you and people like you could be with people like him and people all over the world could lay their guard down at each others’ feet and be happy...

You shouldn’t think of how you just got too drunk and his friend made a move and you took it, and you ran with it. How you kissed all the rhythm in your body into a slack face that probably felt like he was scoring. How it felt wrong, but not sexy wrong or really liking a dumb R&B pop song wrong but empty, stupid, pointless, heartless, desperate, inevitable, too little too late.

So you stand where you stand in the bedroom, and he stands very still between the bed and the door. And the face says “Man, I’m sorry.”

And all you can think is:
My hair looks really good.