When I got home, I had this sense of urgency overtaking me. I needed to read those diary entries and I needed to read them fast. The faster I read them, the closer I could get to Eleanor and God, did I want to be close to her. I wanted to get inside...
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Saturday couldn't come fast enough. I spent the rest of the week searching through Eleanor's Instagram in hopes of finding a hint towards what her favourite food was. After ten minutes, scrolling aimlessly through almost three hundred posts, I found exactly what I was looking for. A picture of a big bowl of pasta captioned, "Pasta is my favourite." That was very straight to the point and I was happy about that.
I went out early that morning to the grocery store to buy everything I needed to make her my best "Spicy spaghetti pasta". I'm not sure if that's the real name, but that's what I labelled it as when I wrote it down in my list of meals for dinner.
Minced meat, fresh garlic, tomato paste, cooking cream, lots of spices, spaghetti noodles and a lot of parmesan cheese sprinkled on top with some chilli flakes.
After the grocery store, I went over to the plant shop not far from me. In this neighbourhood, everything was relatively close to you and that's why I loved it.
I spent five minutes browsing, but I didn't know what to get. There were so many options and I didn't know what Eleanor already had or not. I don't know the names of any of them either, so I couldn't exactly identify them from her pictures that she posted.
"Can I help you out with something today, sir?" I heard a kind voice ask from behind me.
I turned and nodded my head. "Yeah, I'm uh, shopping for my girlfriend and I'm looking for maybe a... rare plant? If those exist. I mean, she has every plant in the world it seems, so I want to get her something she doesn't have." I explained to her.
I saw her listen intently before walking over to the other side of the shop that I hadn't even gotten to yet. I walked with her, watching her as she picked up a plant from a high shelf and showed it to me. "So this is an Alocasia Reticulata. It's not usually found at most stores you go to but it's something we carry. I hope she doesn't have this but I'm pretty confident that she doesn't. Most people don't." She told me.
It's green, it's beautiful, it'll do the trick. "That sounds good to me. I'll take it." I said. $35 later for one plant, I headed home with my hands full, careful to not drop or damage the plant in any way.
I spent all day cleaning and organizing my apartment so that it was fit for Eleanor. I wanted everything to be perfect, it had to all be perfect, including me. I didn't want to mess anything up. I really wanted this woman, I wanted her to be mine and I couldn't have anything go wrong.
I even touched up my beard, which is something I often forget to do. I wore black jeans and a white shirt, not wanting to be too fancy. I checked my complexion in the mirror in my bathroom about a dozen times to make sure not even a single hair was out of place.
By 4:00pm, I was curating a playlist on Spotify for her, a compilation of many songs from artists that I saw she liked from her social media. I loved that the internet made this so easy for me. At this rate I'm going to be irresistible to her. I loved to cook, she loved to eat, we liked the same artists, I even bought her a plant to join her collection. What was there not to like?
