what i remembered i forgot despite the fact that i had told myself to remember

i was brusthing my teeth last night when something occurred to me.

epiphanies often do occur to me in such inconvenient circumstances as having a mouth filled with toothpaste froth.

mariano - about whom i'd spent the greater part of an entire school year crying and being depressed - would never have worked for me! why? because he was the first person ever to "lay eyes" on me. the first romantic - i mean really romantic, not like a high school dance or having a "boyfriend" put his arm around me at the movies - experience of my life. AT THAT POINT I HAD ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA OF WHAT I WANTED! i mean, sure when you're casually dating someone all that matters is the attention factor. you're happy so long as you get attention from your latest interest.

the epiphany last night was this: he never knew me, not the way i want to be known. i never knew him, not in the way i realize i would like to know someone significant in my life. had i been crazy and threw my college fund down the drain and moved to salta to be with him who knows what would have happened. i used to think that had i stayed things would naturally have developed and "blossommed" but on what terms? attention factor, most likely. but beyond that is very questionable given that i have only relatively recently (ie, since taking myself off the market in august) realized what it is that i might really want; what characteristics in another person matter to me.

so sure a long term thing might have happened with mariano. but having started the relationship when i was only 20, i would not know my own capacities to "survive"; would not have known what to look for; would only have followed my grandma's lema (the one she taught me the day i spilled coke all over my overalls at the museum): fake it till you make it. so i would have ended up like my parents quite a few more years down the road - pretending to be the happy family, the happy wife, the satisfied mother. and it would probably have ended just like my parent's marriage is ending.

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dick durbin, you're my HERO!