I spent the next week agonizing over what the hell happened. Wondering what the hell happened to Nate. What the hell I did wrong. It made absolutely no sense whatsoever that things were going so well and then for him to suddenly fall of the face of the earth like that.

At least this was what I kept telling myself. Trying to convince myself that my statement of missing him was not what scared him away. Not wanting to believe that maybe my mom was right. Maybe he was married and I was just a fool.

On my way to the grocery store one night, my mind was playing out all sorts of scenarios and replaying our conversations when I suddenly remembered the online chat he and I had the day we first 'met'. He was telling me about an email he received from another woman, actually one of many emails from her. Nate said this woman, a woman he never met, kept emailing him through match, wondering 'what happened', saying she thought they had such a great connection.

Nate even sent me the email to read myself because he found it strange, considering he and the woman were strangers. He said to me in the chat "I've never met this woman before. I have no idea what she's talking about! There are some crazy women out there!"

The epiphany I had while roaming the aisles of Whole Foods was that this situation with this mysterious woman sounded vaguely reminiscent of my own experience with Nate. I began to wonder if it wasn't the woman, but rather Nate that was crazy. Maybe he suffered short term memory loss? Amnesia?

That was the excuse I grabbed onto, at least for that day, as I tried to make myself feel better about why I hadn't heard from him. It wasn't me. It was him.

Despite my best efforts and thoughts on the matter, I realized that for all the hype and excitement and this ridiculous idea that we were meant for each other, we weren't meant to be after all. And that made me sad.

The worst part was that almost overnight, Nate became the measuring stick against which all future guys would be measured. He was everything I thought I wanted and then some. To me, he was the perfect guy (aside from that whole minor detail of not calling me ever again - but whatever...)

I thought he was special. Different. But the reality was that he was just a liar and told me things I wanted to hear. Despite seeming so utterly different from all the other guys he wasn't. I couldn't believe things had turned out this way. It wasn't fair.

Oh shut up, LIFE isn't fair, The Banshee said, tired of listening to me whine about Nate. Get over it. So he wasn't into you. So what?

SO WHAT? GWG piped in, so he wasn't in to her? He was completely into her until she went and ruined things by admitting her feelings for him. Things headed south the minute she invited him upstairs into his bed and spread her legs...

Tired of listening to GWG, The Banshee jumped off her high horse, grabbed her baseball bat on the way down and went after GWG swinging. It only took one swift konk on the noggin and she was out. The Banshee hogtied her, boxed her back up and sent her to the South Pole for the coming winter.

There. That should keep her busy for a while. Look. So it didn't work out. It's not the end of the world. You had fun with Nate, right? All is not lost. You learned something really important out of this, you realize.

What, not to sleep with guys on a first date who are probably married and keep my mouth shut?

No, dumbass. You learned 2 things. One - you're ready for a relationship and you know what you want from that relationship.

Yeah, that's helpful; I can know what I want, but lotta good that will do me when I tell the guy what I want, because I'll just scare him away.

Hunny, look. The right guy won't scare off that easy. If he's the one, you telling him so won't make him run anywhere but in your direction. Trust me.

How the hell she got so smart, I have no idea. But if you gotta have a noisy sub-conscious, a girl couldn't ask for a better one than The Banshee no matter how bitchy she could be.