Vanessa just moved out. 🙁 After an evening of just raunchy and hilarious joking and laughing with her, her boyfriend, and their future roommate/her martial arts trainer, Vanessa and her boyfriend picked up the last of her stuff here and the three of them left. As she pulled her SUV out of my garage, she waved sadly at me and I laughed and waved back, closed the garage door after her, and came back into a house that is so incredibly silent after all the raucous between the four of us just minutes before. Those two guys have the same inappropriate humor as me, except I don’t get some of their movie references. Earlier, as we walked out of the Japanese restaurant, Vanessa and I in front, the guys behind us, I overheard the trainer say to her boyfriend, “This is the most fun I’ve had in weeks.” I think we may have scared or irritated some of the patrons in the restaurant with how much fun we were having.

I wandered upstairs and looked into the spare room and was surprised it was not nearly as empty as I’d expected it to be. And I realized it was all my stuff. She’d put everything back the way it was when she moved in, just as she’d done with her bathroom, except for a few candle additions. I’m sitting on my new recliner in the living room, and as I look around, I note the only changes that prove she’d ever lived here: the missing dining room table and chairs; a huge bunch of yellow roses, daisies, lilies, eucalyptis and bells of Ireland in a vase; an equally huge wicker gift basket wrapped so beautifully I don’t know how I’m gonna bring myself to open it, filled with so many things I love that she has learned in these past two months living with me — Hawaiian lei flower-shaped floating candles from Illuminations, a gourmet milk chocolate bar w/almonds, white chocolate bar, bottle of floral white wine, a package of scented clear tea lights, a “Private Party Kit” from Frederick’s of Hollywood (I confess I have no idea what’s in that box), an AMC movie giftcard, and a gift certificate to a fancy restaurant she’d been touting, Anaheim White House Restaurant. She said it was a date in a basket in which she’d provided everything from entertainment and dinner to after-dinner events.

When she was packing the last of her stuff into boxes upstairs earlier, I heard her talk to Dodo and saw my stairwell light up with her camera flash several times. After only 2 short months, I think she anticipates missing us as much as Dodo and I miss her already. *sniff*

(In an episode of “Friends” where Chandler had decided —

[Haha, Vanessa just called me from the road. She said her trainer said that I’m “really really really cool” and also, “she’s HOT!” Vanessa always makes my day.]

— to move in with Monica, and the two break the news to Joey that Chandler’s moving out and to Rachel that she has to move out so Chandler could move in, the four roommates had teary goodbyes about how “it’s the end of an era!”)