of our nights were spent pointing out who was gay (everybody), and then the weekend was over. Now we’re headed home alone with each other.

It’s practically scientific how hyped one gets before a night out—all hopped up on New Kids and Corona—and then how quickly hope deflates. We say it’s because we’re getting too old for the club, but I swear it’s because we’re just bored of it. Plus, my feet hurt. Why’s there never any place to sit the hell down?

Gina is staring out the window of her discontent as we drive up Rhode Island Avenue, lost in thought. I’m twenty-eight, she says, breaking the silence of a night that produced more bunions than love connections. This shit isn’t a fucking game anymore, she says. I’m fucking tired, she says. It’s two thousand and fucking eight, she says. I say Umm-hmm and look out my own window, wondering when and having no answers. We go the rest of the way in silence, drag ourselves up four flights, and fall asleep. Tomorrow, maybe, will be different.

Lisa Nowak taught us different the year before.

“Please tell me you saw this shit about this crazy-ass white lady? The astronaut lady?” she IM’d me one morning as I clicked between the New York Times and TheYBF.com, pretending to bone up on Sen. Whoeverthehell’s latest bill about scratching balls while scrolling through snark-infested blogs about black celebs and/or crazy white ladies.

So of course I’d seen it. Mug shots? Murderous monkey-junk love? A productive workday’s worst nightmare. This was what the two of us lived for—something so ridiculous it warranted research.

“Fock! That shit was so damn awesome,” I typed back. “I can’t even breathe right now it’s touching my heart so much.”

“YES!!”

“Dude? Yes!”

And with that, a diapered astronaut became our muse—the awesome crazy we measured our own bizarre love lives against. If we didn’t go that nuts (950 miles with Depends at the ready) over some dude with helmet hair, then maybe we’d be okay. Just maybe. This was the same year that we’d decided to stop “dating” and start “looking.” Two thousand and seven was the year we officially entered our late twenties—the starting line of the death march to menopause. This was the year I fell in love with Dex10, Gina got proposed to, and we both came up smelling like teen spirit—overbored, in denial, and mostly unintelligible. Hello? It was the year my mother, a pot-smoking lesbian who in a moment of overbonding told me she’d been celibate for twelve years because she hadn’t found “an acceptable mate,” began to sneak “grandbabies” into every conversation. She even asked me to come visit her in Atlanta one bitter February.

“How do you know I don’t have plans, like for Valentine’s Day or something?”

“Well,” she purred, “do you?”

I hate her sometimes.

This was also the year Gina erratically swore off black guys for white guys, then Jewish guys, then any guy, even gay guys. It was a flag on the play year for all of us girls. One of my best friends from home, Monique, was dating a married man with four kids who made $490 every two weeks.

“He’s getting divorced.”

“Yeah, but he is married now, right?”

She also had an on/off thing with this Sunday-jazz-brunch guitarist guy. We called him Mr. Damon because he was in his mid-forties, and we respect our elders. Two of my sorority sisters were getting divorces. They had three years of marriage and as many kids between them. My college roommate, Stella, was living with a potentially gay man and constantly checking his e-mail. She’d come across a few juicy tidbits—drinks with an ex when he was supposed to be with the guys—but I don’t think she ever found what she was looking for.

This year, we had a certain refrain committed to memory:

“Dude, where are the men at?” Gina would start.

“Sheeeeeeiiiiiit,” I’d say. They might as well have been on the moon.

Our astronaut, Lisa Nowak, was like us. She was well educated: U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1985. She was successful: umm, NASA. And she would do practically anything to hold on to what she thought was a good man—checking his e-mail, Google-mapping her competition’s whereabouts, then showing up unannounced. We worshipped her. The police found her in an airport parking lot in possession of a steel mallet, a four-inch buck knife, a BB gun, and a map to the home of her rival, Colleen Shipman. All Lisa wanted to do was “talk.”

“Dude, if by ‘talk’ you mean do intense bodily harm!”

We