May 25, 2001

There's a knock on the door around 10pm, and I think it's Ethan.  Hurray, he's started to be spontaneous just like I always wished he would be.  You know, like how they do it in all the movies and TV shows you see.  Not a phone call, a knock at the door.  You open it, and there they are on the other side, looking impossibly beautiful and sad and lost, or maybe not sad and lost but impossibly beautiful and maybe anxious, because they've been thinking of you, and they just can't rest until they get to you, the thought of you propelling their every move.  Oh yippee.  If he can start doing this, then he can start talking, it's gonna be fine, fine, fine, just like how I wanted it to be.  I throw open the door, and it's Ashley.  Of course.

If she notices any strange look on my face that she's not my real life TV show embodiment, she doesn't show it.  She says she's got great news, and we gotta go.  I think she must've got some huge part in a pilot or indie movie or something. 

I think some distant relative must have died (close enough to leave her a buttload of money, not close enough to be incapacitated with grief to spend it.), I think a billion things, and why it's not the one she tells me is completely beyond me.  It would be so obvious to anybody else watching if it was my TV show.  But no, it's not until she shoves her left hand underneath my nose and that huge rock just sparkles evilly up at me that I get it.  I get it.  I get it now.

"We're engaged!" she squeals.  I stare dumbly at the rock on her hand like it's a cockroach.  Or a wart.  Or an extra finger, waving at half mast.  It looks so alien, resting on her hand.