712
Two years ago last week, I visited my old apartment.
It comes up in my Memories now and man, it’s bittersweet.
Got a similar jolt the other day when I saw the address of a guy I’ve gone on some dates with.
His apartment number is 712.
And a lightning bolt shot through me for some reason when I saw that.
Last night after mostly finishing this recurring project from hell, I treated myself to playing dead on the couch.
And it hit me why 712 meant something to me.
It was the house number where I spent a great deal of my formative years.
I met JO when we were 10, but we really spent high school together.
Anyway guess who fell down the Google rabbit hole last night.
The house looks the same on Zillow. Though I might have screamed when I realized the pool was gone.
Fut the wuck?
Had a lot of fun times and wore a lot of cute swimsuits there.
Sat on that window seat a million times. Because I didn’t trust his waterbed. Lordt how cool that was then!
Mom always found cute clothes and swimwear for me in Lerner’s and the Newport News catalog. Heck I am still finding clothes she bought from back then with the tags on. Always saving it for something special that never came. Fashion Bug and Dot’s too. This paragraph is a fast-fashion time capsule.
Anyway, it looks like JO’s parents sold the house in 2016. Bought a new one across the street from him in 2017 in the state where he had moved to.
I love that for them. We may not be friends anymore, but they were my bonus family for a lot of years. I will always, always wish them the best.
The Google stuff wore out my already tired brain. But I did want to see how JO’s been voting these days. Since he was one of those who registered Republican when we were 18. And our idiot friend Frumper did the same.
Thankfully, JO is now a faithful, active Democrat. Good boy.
It was really the whole 712 of it all that sent me into Wonderland here.
But the whole “Orange president gets mad that no one attends his $45 million birthday party so he bombs Iran in an Adderall-fueled rage” really got me to thinking about JO.
Change the “N” to a “Q” and now it’s 1991 all over again.
JO turned 18 that December. I was worried sick that he’d be drafted. Shit, that conscription would come for me in 1992.
How he registered Republican after that, I’ll never know. That’s what cemented me going the opposite way. And never looking back.
Anyway. I wonder if anyone who doesn’t have anger issues goes down the Google hole about me.
My age and address are wrong on most sites.
And there’s no record of my Momma anywhere.
My grandparents appear to be my parents on every family tree type of site.
And apparently my email address is still the one I got in 1995 at college.
Of course, there are so many people with my name, maybe everyone thinks I’m the animal killer or the girl who went missing when we were teenagers. Or at least the software executive in Orlando.
I just hope any random Memory Lane strollers see my better photos and not the Kim Lardassian ones. I never mind being fat till I Google myself. Like, can the AI algos promote the less-fat ones, please?