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November 2004. We had a blast. Michelle thought I loved the artwork there. I really just loved watching her talk about it. I could care less about the sculptures or paint strokes. It was her reactions to visual arts that I thought was artistic. She articulated what the paintings made her experience so elegantly. I closed my eyes and imagined the words she said.
    So the tradition started. Ever since that day we’ve been going to the Museum of Fine arts for one of our birthdays each year. I have a September birthday she has a November birthday. Come to think of it, I’m not sure if Michelle knows that I really still haven’t learned to love visual arts.
    Here we were eight years after our first time in this building together. These museum meetups are a time where we step outside our own lives and examine it like it is a work of art. Michelle would always say, “your life should be your masterpiece, not something on a piece of canvas.” She says all these beautiful things without even knowing it. If only she would write them down.
    This day was different than our other meetings. I was just gazing into surrealist paintings trying to get Michelle to describe them for me. She’s never been a fan of surrealism. After about an hour at the museum Michelle snapped.
    “You’re always looking for someone to make you feel like you’re on a drug. If a person doesn’t make you feel that way, then you try to look for experiences that make you feel high -- usually in the presence of a female,” she said.
    I thought that came out of nowhere. We had been seeing each other less in the past year. Maybe my demeanour was a bit more cynical. Maybe my smiles have been turned into grins. In that moment I thought to myself. This is the moment. This is when friendships fade.
    “And why not with you? I don’t try to feel like I’m on a drug around you Michelle,” I said.
    “I’m saying this as a friend. Seriously Jake. I worry about you. This isn’t about me. It’s about you. I never see you smile anymore. You used to be so excited about everything,” she said.
    “Why are we friends again?” I said.
    Sitting there I could already begin to feel this relationship expire. She’ll find some investment banker, fall in love – and I’ll be lucky if I even get an invite to her wedding. It’s the natural cycle of things. People forget about you. I started to feel dizzy. What could I do to recover from this conversation? Nothing. I just looked into the picture of Don Quixote by Salvador Dali on the wall. Before I could think of anything to say Michelle kept hitting me with hail.
    “You know I liked certain parts of you more when you thought about philology all day. You were still calculated but you were artistic about it,” she said.
    “and now?” I said.
    “You’re all numbers, expected outcomes, if you could monte carlo method love… you’d be the first one in line,” she said.
    Her comment regarding numbers hit me hard. As a consultant a lot of things boil down to numbers at the end of the day. Maybe I just took it to the logical extreme and made my whole existence about numbers. I thought she would understand, given what she does for a living. This conversation was tanking, I felt like I was being broken up with... but there was nothing to be broken up?
    “Aren’t you the one that’s an economist? Plus online dating has already turned love into a numbers game.” I said.
    Then Michelle did what she did best. Respond to things based on what she feels.
    “Sure I’m an economist, that’s what I do for a living. It doesn’t define what I feel. What I think. How I act. Your passion for language words and history is what drew me into you in the first place. It was refreshing to see someone care about things other than numbers,” she said.
    I stayed silent.
    “Plus, don’t knock online dating. It’s actually a pretty good thing,” she said.
    I totally didn’t expect our conversation to turn to one about the merits of