I am listening to my iPod. It's in it's little docking station, and it's playing one of my guilty pleasures-A group called"Train" .Their song Cab plays on my love for the piano, and my melancholy relationship with 'yacht rock' and I find myself fighting to keep from indulging in my own cab ride down memory lane.

But, I go there anyway.

I grab a Diet Pepsi from the 'fridge and tuck my cold toes under me and sit, leaning sideways in my big 'ole bankers chair behind my old oak desk.

I call him T to respect our privacy. T and I broke up after dating seriously and exclusively for six months.

It was easy at first. He was kind, and charming and handsome.

Over time I started to see little things. Little things became big things. He was not who I thought he was, or who I thought I heard him say he was.

He made a mistake. Not the big-one, but a betrayal mistake all the same. I was justified in breaking it off.

The last night I saw him, he romantically surprised me with a train ride down to Eugene where my family lives. We had a pleasant visit and returned to Seattle and had dinner at the Space Needle. The restaurant atop the Space Needle spins slowly, offering a panoramic city view over the waterfront and Sound. The Emerald City is very romantic and special. That night we took lots of pictures of each other from my camera. That was the night I discovered his betrayal.

It was a train ride I won't soon forget. The the dichotomy of emotions that day, leave me spinning and locked in time, like a portrait. I don't use that camera.... where his pictures are.

I shift in my chair and it squeaks and I don't want to spray any more WD-40 on it because it seems to make it stop, only to squeak worse after a little while. That's how I look at love.

I put a little effort into looking for a nice guy. I choose the online method. l usually end up with one or two pretty good dates. I explore the relationship from a friendship angle at first. A couple more dates and I am allowing myself to slip into a trance-like state of thinking about him in terms of maybes' and possibilities' and am always revived by realities of imperfection, past-baggage and fear, but for a while I feel sane and pretty and validated.

I allow myself to fall a little, and a little more. Then, it begins again. I sense something gnawing at him. Maybe he isn't that in to me? Then, something gnaws at me, tells me that I am missing something in him. Maybe he isn't who I love. Maybe he isn't who I want to have a family with. He is a little this, and a little that. I compare him to that one. That infatuation and heart-break I had, and ...... before long, the lubrication is gone. He isn't the one.

SQUEEK!

I sit alone typing this and I wonder if I am the typical millennial girl?

I ask myself if prolific media has educated me beyond my own ability to process and glean from it, what is useful? Has economic independence made us women more attractive or less? Has education and intelligence and moral decay kept me single? Am I so addicted to melancholy, that I am my own undoing? Am I my own problem and solution? I quickly clear my head of that.

I take a cab to meet some friends and on my way back home I check my watch for the first time in hours. It's late. I think about this article I have to finish. How will I end it, I wonder, staring out the window at the empty street?

Streetlights with no real purpose this time of night. Like them, I think about how I cast a light out into the single,darkness, hoping for someone to occupy the space I've tried to illuminate and define. There is no traffic tonight. No pedestrians Just me in this cab. We pull to the curb and I pay and the driver doesn't look at me or say goodnight. Tail lights show his nervous fare-chase, down Queen Anne Hill, then a quick left, and I am alone.

I tiredly decide I will wait until the next morning to germinate my thoughts on how to close this Article.

It's early Sunday Morning now. I can't sleep. It is peaceful and quiet, alone in my house. I sit on my cold toes in my office chair, leaning to one side, thinking. I stare out my window at the snow that fell again last night. I am just a couple miles from the Space Needle and a thousand miles from the place where I will forget him, at least, not for a long time- completely.

"The days are better, but the nights are still so lonely. Sometimes I think I'm the only cab on the road."