I had the feeling I was a placeholder girlfriend. That once the winter was over she wouldn’t need me anymore.
I had this feeling because it hadn’t started like my other relationships. I’d kept seeing her at parties with all the Toronto grad students that autumn and thought she was so different from me. Whatever the opposite of basic is. Advanced? I had the feeling she didn’t even own sweatpants, if that makes sense. She’d see me across the party and would watch me but wouldn’t return my waves. Somehow she found out I had a crush on her and it didn’t change anything. Just the stare, maybe a polite nod, then she’d go back to half-listening to whoever was trying to impress her. She was beautiful like an ice sculpture is beautiful.
I knew her thesis was on Italian autonomist feminism of the 1970s. I had no idea what that meant so I never risked talking to her and embarrassing myself. My thesis was on the history of memes. I wanted to change it but didn’t know what else I could talk about.
Then one night she called me. The wind of the first real snowstorm whistled through my window and made me cover my other ear while I listened to her talk to me for the first time. She told me she found me really pretty. That she’d always admired me from a distance. And would I come over?
We didn’t talk much that night or any night after. But on the subway back to my apartment in North York the next morning, in between games of Candy Crush, I realized we were going out. I had a nagging feeling I couldn’t explain though. Before she’d kissed me she’d told me that she’d been in a long distance relationship and they’d broken up that day. It flattered me that I was who she called but it wasn’t exactly romantic.
I only worried I was a placeholder girlfriend in the back of my mind though, like when I woke up or when videos were loading. It became real when I saw the list. When I saw the rubric.
She had been at the university and needed files off her computer. I was lazing around in her living room. I had four roommates and she had none. I should have been working on my thesis, but I enjoyed being in an apartment without roommates so much that I was just laying around listening to my Harry Potter podcasts. I didn’t know if she had rent control or was just rich but she did have an office. She was like what I imagined a grad student should be. She had me go into her office and she walked me through transferring the files. But she had left a spreadsheet open.
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