Decade - a Post Named After My Favorite Duran Duran Album Which I Was Listening to Compulsively 10 Years Ago

10 years ago today, February 6th, 1998, I was waiting frantically by the computer, hoping AbwehrKanone66 would come online. It was his birthday - I wanted to wish him a happy one and see if he'd gotten the birthday card and stuffed manatee I'd sent him. AbwehrKanone66 was, for all intensive purposes, my first love - really an infatuation but at 18 and in the throes of infatuation's passionate grip for the first time ever, I didn't know the difference. We were meant to be.

AbwehrKanone66 appeared. He had gotten my gift and was thrilled. I never thought I could be so happy - I was basking in the glow of what I felt was a mutual, loving attraction. When things went terribly wrong shortly thereafter, I was gutted, devastated, took to wearing black from head to toe and lost 25 pounds in a matter of weeks. I started college weighed down by a pall of heartbroken misery and constantly thought back to the few short months when things had seemed beautiful. I thought, too, about the stupid manatee - a complete waste of caring sentiment on such a lying, cheating manchild.

With time, things improved, as they always do. I slowly began to date - first, a college sweetheart and, after our breakup, strings of pompous, drunken New York City nimrods. I suffered through another lethal unrequited infatuation at the age of 23 and once rid of that, like a mangy dog shaking off its aggressive fleas, I tried my hand at dating again only to be annoyed by more New York City idiots. At 26, I swore off romance for good. I was, after all, heterosexual poison. My history had shown me no other possibility.

One and a half years after that declaration, and 10 years to the day after I waited, pining by the computer, for the ultimately poisonous and deceitful AbwehrKanone66 to flash onto my screen, my boyfriend and I gave a real estate agent our "okay" for an apartment we would like to move into. It is more than twice the size of the ones we live in now, half the price, and in a location mere steps away from the train station. Best of all, we get to be together all the time.

We're crazy about each other. My parents will each surely give birth to identical white mewling kittens when they discover my plans but after much thought, moving in with my long, lean Irish beau only seems natural.

This, I could never have imagined.