um, awkward.

My office is one block from Seattle's primary sleazy urban market.  City Market goes a step beyond your average convenience store with vegetables and movie rentals and a real deli.  Out front are bizarre signs hand-drawn in colored marker and taped to sandwich boards, generally bearing a very bad celebrity portrait and some sort of pun involving "latte" or "sandwich."  Oh, yeah, they supposedly serve espresso too.

City Market is the place you go because you have to.  Maybe you live in the neighborhood and need a candy bar or a bottle of chablis to go with Oprah in the afternoon.  Maybe you are a transient and need a lotto ticket.  Maybe you just happen to be the strange-smelling person who does grocery shopping at city market.  Most likely its ten to 2 in the morning and you are standing in line to buy a 12-pack of PBR, a bottle of champagne, and a pack of cigarettes to get you through the night.

Here's the awkward part: The first man I ever had sex with works the late shift in the deli at City Market.  We're talking 1989, North Idaho, awkward.

I've seen him around town over the years, and we usually say hi and report on the respective states of our mothers.  However, in the past year that I have worked one block from him I haven't had the nerve to say hello.  I'm not prepared to hear why the keeper of my virginity works the night shift at the most disgusting grocery store on earth at the age of 38.  I really don't want to find out that he still lives in the ramshackle Olive Tower fifteen years later.  It would only depress me to discover that he survives on corndogs, red bull, and cigarettes.

I see him at least a few times a week. I've pointed him out to my friends like some kind of exotic animal, but every time I think he might spot me I avert my eyes.  Surely he's seen me.  I've been keeping this up for a year now, hoping maybe one of us will get a new job.  Earlier this week, two colleagues and I were walking up the sidewalk to the parking garage en route to a meeting, and there he was walking straight toward us, Mr. Virginity.  I quickly became very engaged in the conversation and managed not to look directly at him as he walked past us.

This afternoon when I left work he was standing outside on a smoke break and I re-routed myself to a roundabout route home rather than crossing and saying hello.  It seems too late now.  I've been snubbing him too long to actually make contact.

There's no good reason to avoid him.  It's not as if there were bad feelings - we never even dated.  On the other hand, the more I think about him the more I find that I don't really like him much. So why bother with fake friendliness just because we happened to have some loveless sex 18 years ago?  I guess I'll just feel awkward until I can't avoid the meeting, and then I will say "hello, how's your mom?"