Her-story Will Absolve Me

As Fidel Castro once said, during what must have been a three hour + speech, History Will Absolve Me. Well, this weekend I found out that Fidel and I have more in common than I thought (my friends will know I'm not really joking here.) Ho, like her comrade Fidel, has also been absolved by history. Or his story. Or her story. Or her Amiri story.

The other day, I ran into Sarah, a girl whose best friend Will is one of Amiri's good friends. While dating Amiri, whenever I hung out with his friends I would find found myself stuck in an enjoyable but strange sort of Bermuda's triangle. If you substitute (1)sports, (2) politics, and (3) cutesy-joking-flirting-smiling-gazing in eyes-talking-about nothing for the (1)Straits of Florida, (2)the Bahamas, and (3) the Atlantic. Or maybe a Venn diagram is a better example. But those are hard to do on a computer. Amiri and his friends shared a deep love for sports (which I don't know anything about.) Amiri's friends and I shared a deep interest in politics (which Amiri tries to not know anything about.) And Amiri and I shared inside jokes, stares, smiles and hand holding, which we did not share with Amiri's friends. So Amiri and I would cute-talk to each other, Amiri and his friends would sports-talk to each other, and Amiri's friends and I would politics-talk to each other. In a weird way, I could talk to his friends more than I could talk to him.

Anyway, I asked Sarah how Will was and during our chit chat I recalled how Will would multi task, having political conversations with me and speaking sportsese with Amiri. Then, without any prompting, Sarah said, "that's funny because I was hanging out with Will today and we were talking and he said 'you know Amiri is great, but he can't talk about anything but sports'."

Halleljah! Now I know it's not just my sports illiteracy. I always though that Amiri had an unhealthy obsession with sports and lived a ridiculously sportscentric life. In fact, he discussed our entire relationship-- and all relationships-- through sports metaphors . But then again, sometimes I thought, maybe it's me, not him. After all, I'm pathologically bad at sports and have confused baseball for basketball on a few occasions. But now I know that Amiri's very athletic friend, who also loves sports, and even plays on a team with Amiri, thinks Amiri is Outta control. This story has relieved me. And made me sad for Amiri. But mostly satisfied for myself.