The Yellowstone Volcano Guy

    

            “It was like the Yellowstone Volcano was erupting,” he tells me on our first date that I still deny was a date. Earlier that week, recognizing this man as one of my yoga students, I’d approached him in the library. At the time, I was piggybacking a beast called Sadness everywhere –– my shoulders rounded, chin lowered and exhales inappropriately loud.  With a “closure” letter for my ex-boyfriend, I’d lugged myself and the beast away from the library printers –– my head hung.  It was in the singular moment that I lifted my chin that I saw my student sitting in an armchair filling out paperwork.  

            “Hey,” I’d said. “You came to my yoga class in January.”           

            As he gazed up at me, his glasses didn’t detract from the acute handsomeness of his facial bone structure –– jaw line and cheekbones prominent.  Coughing, mumbling, and wiping his palms on his carhartts, he looked only slightly less composed than a man about to go from chilling in a library to asphyxiating and burning in a volcano's heat.

            In my yoga pants, I stretched my calf on his chair. “What’s the paperwork for?”

            “The Forest Service,” he said and pointed to the space where he’d printed his name. “Look: I don’t have a middle name so I’m putting ‘No Name’ between my first and last. Isn’t that funny?”

            I nod. “What do you do for the Forest Service?”

            “Wildland fire management,” he said. 

            “So you keep fires contained or put them out or start them or what?”

            “Sure.” He smiled. He had funny little teeth. “So you remember me from class.”

            “Sure,” I said, stretching my other calf. “So why’d you never come back?”

            And so of course he came to my class that afternoon. After, he asked if I wanted to do partner acro yoga with him on Wednesday. I said no (sounded too date-like). Then did I want to climb instead? I said maybe. But the idea of trying to climb rocks with the beast of Sadness hanging from my shoulders was as unappealing as everything else at the time. Everything except for drinking bubble tea. And because it was my new favorite activity, and because anything involving bubbles seems like safe territory, we started with meeting at Townshend’s Tea House downtown.

            “Well,” I say after laughing at his Yellowstone Volcano and dozens of other hilarious comments, “That’s the most creative way a guy has ever told me I’m hot. Apocalyptic even. I’m something, but I don’t know I’m all that . . .”

            “Guys must say crazy shit to you all the time,” he says, bending his straw right and left. Always doing something with his hands.

            I smile. “Actually, they say really boring things like that I’m interesting.”

            And I begin the project of sucking up the last of the tapioca pearls stuck together at the bottom of my cup.  This is often a two-person project abandoned by the reasonable and completed by the stubborn. It involves sharing a straw, which involves exchanging saliva. Which is what you do when you kiss. And, because I’m not ready for dates or kisses, I work alone on sucking up every last tapioca pearl instead of sharing my effort or “story” with him.  The circumference of what I’ve told him about myself is small, and the surface area composed of details about my previous relationship. Something, for example, about how my calls must have been forwarded to the guy’s “automated voice messaging system” so many times while dating him that I’d memorized his number.  I'd only realized this after deleting it and then, recently, remembering it to text that I’d found his missing cross. Well, I hadn’t known in which order the last four numbers were, so that took awhile .  .  .

            “Do you miss him?” the Yellowstone Volcano Guy asks.

            “Sure.” I say, and, in between sucking up the bubbles: “Of course. Sometimes. Not really. Yeah. A lot.  No. It’s fucked up.”

            Finished with my tea now –– certain I’ve done nothing to lead Yellowstone Volcano Guy on –– I meet his eyes. The browns, greens, and grays in them play hard  –– swirling like the hot lava of that volcano that would leave us with only about seven seconds to live if it did erupt.  I listen to what this man has to say about himself.  He grew up on a ranch in central Montana. He hunts, snowboards, mountaineers, welds, climbs, fishes, does yoga, fights wildland fires, and likes fun.  He’s almost 30.  The way he speaks to me is kind and natural.  Making me laugh and smile, he yanks the beast off my back, and I inhale really deeply for the first time in months. 

            Now I have to go home.

            During the ensuing weeks of adventures together involving caramels, rocks, fire, beef, woods, tapioca pearls, snacks, electronic music, organic toothpaste, yoga, mischief, and even Father’s Day dinner with his parents in Helena, I resisted this man.

            “Give up on me,” I’d say. “I’m telling you –– I’m romantically unreliable and unavailable.”

            “I’m not ever going to quit trying to be your boyfriend unless you beg me to,” he’d say. “You’re a treasure, and any guy who can’t see that is out of his fucking mind. You’re hilarious, fun, and make my life better in general. I can't wait to take you everywhere and do everything with you." 

            And everything I did was even better done with him.  I’d also stopped crying in Hot Yoga  (two activities, by the way, that are very bad for your contacts). But, addicted to unstable romantic situations, I wasn't attracted to his level of kindness and care. Then one morning he asked me for some of the toothpaste from the tube I’d kept under the pillow that night. He’d caught me finger brushing my tongue, which, before committing to actually getting out of bed and brushing, I sometimes do in the mornings on sleepovers.  

            “Hey crazy chiclet, let me try some of that,” he said.

            And I knew he was a good one for me.

            When we met at the library in April, I was devastated. Now I’m living out of my car and not sure what’s next, but I’m enjoying life again.  Even though yesterday I used a pillowcase as a towel because, having been unable to find somewhere to wash my yoga towel, I’d used my real towel in yoga. When I tell him this, I know he’ll laugh and call me hilarious (not ridiculous). And I’ll laugh too because, right now, I feel ready for anything. I even have the Yellowstone Volcano in the back of my mind, and I’ll try to make sure I’m smiling and have my chin lifted for whatever fun thing I’m doing in my remaining seven seconds.