Drinking warm chai laced with vanilla in a coffee mug designated for a Capricorn. 

On the side in typewriter font it says: “Capricorns are conservative and afraid to take risks. You are a wimp. You don’t do much of anything. There has never been a Capricorn of any importance. Your sex life has slipped into a coma and is now on the critical list. Capricorns should avoid standing still too long as they tend to take root and become trees.”

No one in my house is a Capricorn. From the survey I can take, none of us has ever dated a Capricorn. As long as I have known Ian, we have had this mug. I have this memory of a story of a girl who, thinking Ian was a Capricorn, bought him this mug.

He was in undergrad at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and he used to sleep with girls who wore their pain and insanity like a slip, just letting it peak out the hem of their dresses, waiting underneath their clothes in this sexy undefinable barrier to their real selves. I was never like that. I wonder sometimes if that’s why it didn’t work, and not because he couldn’t seem to throw away an empty soda can if his fucking life, or our relationship, depended on it.

I will leave the mug when I go, because it is not mine, and some girl will come in behind me to drink out of it. She’ll probably not know him, or astrology, well enough to realize he is not a Capricorn and she will go home and compare her astrological sign to his on a website run by two women who wear gypsy scarves in public. It will tell her that her connection with this Capricorn will be fruitful and passionate and she will come back to this place filled with strewn papers and discarded boxer shorts on the living floor like throw rugs and tables lined with soda cans so close to the garbage a breeze could blow them in and she will think that she can be this Capricorn’s savior; she can be his hope.

And I will go off to a man who knows when the electric bill is due or maybe when my birthday is and who sees a hamper and thinks, “I should put my boxers in there now that they are off of my body.” and I will think that maybe it is pathetic to find those qualities important in a person but then I will realize romance isn’t always what you think it will be.

Sometimes it isn’t just long kisses and legs sweaty and tight against each other and the rest of the world fading into nothing around the passion of all that.

Sometimes it is the things before all that, which make the kissing and the nakedness worth it and for everyone that is different and for me it is a clean coffee table and a gas bill I don’t have to worry about that make my knees go week; my lips go soft; makes my tiny aching heart skip beats like a scratched record.