You Belong With Me

There is something about traveling to your hometown after losing a considerable amount of weight that makes you feel like you are in a rom com. Or a Jennifer Weiner novel.

I recently lost a little more weight and toned up a little more thanks to marathon training, so I look pretty similar to my high school weight, even though I am not there yet. I went back home this weekend for my sister's graduation.

On the plus side: everyone tells you that you are gorgeous, that you look amazing and skinny. My sister wouldn't let die the incident where a fellow I went to high school with recognized me in a pizza parlor, and when I told him he looked great, as he had lost a lot of weight, he said, "You still look...amazing." Of course, if rom coms happened in real life, a Taylor Swift song would start playing and I would have fallen in love and stayed in my hometown forever. As they are movies and not real, I left with my pizza and flew back to Chicago.

On the negative side, there are also things that happen in rom coms that are supposed to be funny, but not to the heroine of the piece. Such as your three-year-old cousin informing you out of the blue that you belong with your ex-boyfriend. And this happened even after I bought him a sweet Buzz Lightyear backpack and played basketball with him. Also, it's hard to explain the logistics of relationships to someone who is not fully potty trained. Three-year-olds know little about romantic love (outside of being able to regurgitate Lady Antebellum lyrics. And the vague understanding of the concept of coupling.) Yet this three-year-old is also mystified that I don't belong to anyone. This inevitably will lead me to rom com late night paranoia.

Well...I am not cuing the Taylor Swift song just yet.