The Dating Express has now stopped at my most feared and hated destination. That wasteland exactly between Friendship and Love: AmbiguityLand. Not only has it made its regular stop here, but the train appears to have stalled.

Some people love AmbiguityLand. You can see these weirdos walking around in their visors, cameras in hand, reveling in relationships that are not quite platonic, but not quite sexual, or relationships that are sexual, but not quite committed.

I am not one of these people. I stay inside the train, cowering. Headphones clamped over my ears. This is because I am, as Sexy Boy put it recently, in that quaint Alaskan way of his, “a straight-shootin’ son of a gun.” I do not like ambiguity in any form, but most especially when it comes to matters of my overly-tender, overly-optimistic heart.

When the train breaks down (as it has before) I’m forced to step outside sometimes for fresh air. But every time I do, I get smacked upside the head and knocked down in the gutter. Or I do it to someone else. Or maybe both at the same time.

Like last night, for example. Which, by the way, was not the first official night of fall. Because this year, I declare that fall begins TODAY, September 22. I have been waiting for fall for the last two months. For the beautiful, honeyed Seattle fall to carry away the heartbreak of this summer. Autumn is the time when my life starts turning bright jewel tones, like the leaves.

And so the stupid, stupid, heartbreak I felt last night when I made my misguided venture into AmbiguityLand was, I’d like to say, for the record, not indicative of how my fall is going to be. Because I am not stepping foot in that godforsaken place again, even if this train stays broken, and I have to sit my ass onboard forever.