“You sound like my mom whenever she remembers to actually pay attention to my life.”

“Linds is an anti-feminist succubus with your nose,” Meredith counters. “I am your loyal, loving best friend of seven years who thinks it might be time for you to put on your good bra and try making connections with some new people.”

“You never date either,” I say very maturely from my toilet seat.

“Yes, but the difference is I don’t date by choice, because I’m prioritizing different facets of my life right now. You, on the other hand, don’t date because of past heartbreak and a fear of failure.”

“Did you and Ari coordinate these interventions? Are you in cahoots with Greg and the half-assed snow and the TriMet public transit system to make this day as humiliating as possible?”

Meredith grunts unsympathetically. “Is this still about that woman from last year?”

I play it cool. “What woman?”

“You know what woman I’m talking about,” she snaps, because I’ve never played anything cool in my entire life. “The woman you met at Powell’s on Christmas Eve and fell madly in love with, only to have your heart smashed into a million pieces.”

I don’t let myself think about fiery eyes and freckles. “I did not love her. I barely knew her. We spent one day together. And that’s all it was ever meant to be. One perfect day. How pathetic would it be if I were still hung up on a random woman from a year ago?”

Meredith sees right through me, all the way to the core of my pathetic heart. “Girl, you completely U-Hauled.”

“First of all, as a straight, I don’t think you’re allowed to say that,” I deflect nimbly, “and second, sure, I fell hard, but we were never going to last beyond that one day. I haven’t even thought about her since.”

Much.

“Did you or did you not write an entire webcomic series based on your relationship with her?” Lawyer-Meredith asks me.

“That was… catharsis. That was turning pain into art.”

“A-ha! So you admit that she caused you pain?”

“Very briefly,” I concede. That is the downside to needing emotional connection to feel sexual attraction: there is no physical intimacy without the risk of having my heart broken. “But then I poured my pain into the fictionalized Snow Day webcomic and promptly forgot the entire thing.”

“You’re so full of shit. You haven’t dated anyone in the past year. You’ve barely left your apartment. At some point, you’ve got to confront the fact that the whole thing messed you up more than you’re willing to admit.”

Last Christmas, I gave someone my heart.

And the very next day, she gave it away.

I would be happy to never ever hear that song again.

“What fucked me up was moving across the country for a job and getting fired three months later.”