long before i had met my girlfriend i had some horrible, horrible romantic luck, and as i look back on it from time to time, it strikes me as being oddly comic and somehow deeply pathetic. long before i had met the infamous j of previous posts and before my gilfriend there was l (again to be polite we won't refer to these people by names and it'll protect me from lawsuits). i had met l from a website - migente.com - and after talking thruogh various notes, e-mails and then lenghty phone conversations we had met at a migente hosted party at a club in downtown manhattan. at the time migente, along with black planet and asian avenue were fledging; most of the migente members you encountered were from the metro area and many of them were also on other yahoo clubs and posting boards. i had been to one or two other migente parties that they had hosted in midtown manhattan, near radio city music hall and found the people as a whole to be rather unfriendly and clique-ish. if they didn't know you from their set of friends that they had known from online or hung out with before they got online, they acted like you had leprosy. strangely, when i had gone to those parties in midtown, i had known three other girls who were in one of the same yahoo club/posting boards that i was in and were on migente and only one of them was all that friendly to me.

so when l asked me to come out to this migente party downtown there was a part of me, based on previous experiences that didn't really want to go, and that was balanced by the fact that i had wanted to meet the girl. when i had met l, i thought she was as beautiful as she was in her pictures - she's mixed polish puerto rican and german and it makes her look much like a gyspy - and we had a lot of fun together. she's a huge flirt and at times i can be downright incorrigible. we danced and drank, i met some of her friends who were there, and they were nice to me. l and me had continued to talk over the phone and write each other and occasionally we hung out together. i had begun to seriously crush on her - and sometimes when it comes to those sort of romantic gestures we can all get a bit foolish, we can all envision ourselves as being awkward and getting painfully rejected. after all, exposing your heart to another and having it stomped on carelessly is awful. l and me had gone out to this club in brooklyn for new year's eve 2002, and with it being new year's eve i had been desperately to tell this girl how i had felt but i couldn't and i got incredibly upset towards the end of the night.

a few days later i had e-mailed her, telling her how i had felt. and do you know that she didn't respond back to me one way or another? obviously, i was a bit miffed about it, and at some point i had told her about it. every time, she'd find a a way to avoid it. in fact at one point, she used to complain about how lonely and unloved she had felt - when she had someone who had told her that he liked her, a lot! i had stopped talking to her as a result of it and strangely enough she had found a way into my life again over the passing of some time. and as much as i had liked her as a person on certain levels, i had found myself getting annoyed with her: obviously, over how she had treated my feelings and because she had a way of being flaky without ever apologizing.

not too long ago, she sent me a card to say hi. and in it, she wrote, "how does a sexy, silly girl like me find someone decent in this city?" i haven't written back to her yet but i feel compelled to write to her, "you had one five years ago who had really liked you, and you couldn't and still wouldn't be able to appreciate a decent man." occasionally, l will say or do something that will still get under my skin because she shows that she's oblivious or just plain crazy or something. what do you think?