oasis

July 7. K is back in town. We've been hanging out a lot. She's staying with her parents - originally it was only going to be for two weeks while she waited for the work visa for her next job, for a famous female British Iraqi deconstructivist architect in London, but the visa situation is taking longer to clear and now she is here indefinitely, but at least for another month or so. What's funny is I just found out that X is moving back to her parents' home. So the three of us - who have coupled in this order, B and X, B and K, K and X, B and X, B and K - will be back in Palo Alto indefinitely, living in our parents' homes. We met at the Oasis in Menlo Park yesterday. I was half asleep, but it was still fun to be around both of them. K and X got a little drunk because they got there an hour before I did and finished off a pitcher of Spaten between them. We didn't spend much time talking about the good old times, to my relief. Instead we caught each other up on the last ten years of our lives, during which we hardly saw each other. X noted that her drivers license photo was taken during her "married woman" phase, when she was dating a married straight woman, when she was a part-time personal trainer and Fish Market waitress living with a suspected pedophile whose thirteen year-old "daughter" slept in his bed in San Jose. Neither K nor I knew her during this phase. K told stories about living in east L.A. with a smoking Frenchman who stole money from her, and roommates named "Fairy" and "Coffee," and shitty, dangerous loft spaces partitioned by walls of bubble wrap. I made the sounds Joshua's girlfriend used to make when they screwed two feet away from me in the adjacent room in that railroad apartment. I had a grilled cheese sandwich that gave me amazing diarrhea three hours later. X drove home after distributing a few rounds of intimate hugs, her specialty. I appreciated the touch and held her waist very tightly. K and I biked home slowly, me steering her drunk ass away from the busier streets, listening to her comparing herself to her peers and talking about how she felt like she thought so differently from other people, and telling me that I was unhappy and something was wrong with me. I guess I am still something of a rube, because I still credit everything that drunk people say.