Friday, March 30, 2007

funny story

Chris broke up with me on a Friday in early January, over the phone since he was already back at school in New Haven. The following Tuesday, when I opened my door in the morning to go to work, I found a gift bag of fancy Jacques Torres chocolates on my doorstep. My friend Nick's girlfriend Sarah, a true sweetheart if ever there was one, works at Jacques Torres in Brooklyn, and one of her coworkers happens to live down the hall from me. So Sarah had decided that what a recently-dumped-over-the-telephone-for-another-woman-girl needs, quite logically, is chocolate, and had sent this bag up with Becca to leave for me.

I hadn't actually seen Sarah since last fall until yesterday, when she and Nick and I went out for dinner after work. So though I'd thanked her in an email, I finally got to thank her in person for her sweet gesture all those weeks ago. We joked about how she'd frantically been trying to figure out how to ship the chocolates to my apartment without me having to sign for them or end up having to go to the post office until Becca volunteered to deliver them in person after work. And it turns out that Becca had actually rang the doorbell, not wanting to just leave them out in the hallway. I must have already been in bed, because I don't remember this at all, but Nate was staying with me at the time and apparently thought that the doorbell was the downstairs buzzer, because Becca could hear a man's voice from inside yelling, "Hello? Hello?? Hello?!?" into the intercom. And she panicked, thinking it must be Chris and imagining the horrible, if comic, awkwardness of that little interaction, and so left the chocolates and fled back down the hall.

I guess it never occurred to Nathan to see if anyone was at the door, because he was as surprised as me when I left for work the next morning, in a very dark space, only to find a lovely surprise that made the world seem just the littlest bit warmer.

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