Advice

I knew this guy in college. Really nice guy. Funny. I crushed on him my whole freshman year. Nothing.

Then I go off to Europe, fall madly in love, tragically leave the guy to come back to school and walk around like a nuclear blast survivor irradiating everything I touch. It turns out that guys like radiation, including Nice Funny Guy who falls for me like a sack of potatoes now that I’m toxic and terrible and don’t care.

Long story short, I break his nice funny heart. Or at least I think that I did. He wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the time we were at school, so I’m betting he didn’t enjoy how we ended.

Every once in a while, when I’m thinking about college and writing and New York, I Google him. Turns out he’s on Facebook. Here’s where the advice comes in. Should I friend him?

He’s a writer. I’m a writer. I still feel guilty sometimes about being a jerk to such a nice funny guy. Maybe a.) he will accept my friending and I will never need to feel guilty about him again, plus b.) he will hook me up with all writing buddies and I will be wildly successful.

But that’s weird, isn’t it? (The friending, not the expectations. Of course I will be wildly successful…) I got friended a few months ago by this crazy chick I knew in school who chewed her own thumb flesh and ruined another friend’s life when she left him. Then I got friended by this other woman who, I swear, was nothing but mean to me at college.

By the way, I know “friending” is Friendster-y, but it makes more sense than “facebooking” someone, which means nothing outside the context of Facebook. Maybe “facing” is better as in, “You got faced.” So I got faced by these two chicks and I accepted both in a tribute to how weird it was that they faced me at all.

Hmmm…By that logic, then, if Nice Funny Guy accepts the facing it won’t mean anything after all. But wouldn’t it be a tiny act of apology on my part to have found him and faced him after all this time? Wouldn’t it? Just a little?