Her eyes, lolling around in her head. Shifting back and forth, she looks for the exit. Must escape. His voice loud. Insistent. She must escape. He tries to kiss. She tries to duck. Finally. Escape.
I’m a serial first dater. I meet a fella, I go out with him. Most times, the date goes reasonably well. We chat. We laugh. Things go so well, in fact, that we decide to go out again.
It’s the in-between time, the lag before the “again” that kills the potential for me. Too much time to mull. Too much time to analyze. Too much time to remember that one specific thing that he kept doing that drove me crazy. And since absence has never once made my heart grow fonder, I let it go, often before I even gave it a chance to really begin.
Shit…it’s not like I fancy the idea of being single forever. Intellectually, I know that someday I will have to remove the stick that is wedged firmly up my behind. I know that I am going to have to open myself up (and talk about my feelings?!) and turn my ever-spinning brain off long enough to just be. I know that I’m capable of loving— hell, even liking a man enough to see him again.
It’s not like I’ve never been in love before. I was there, swimming right in that good, healthy love, the kind that turns you into an obnoxious social media oversharer. We were thoroughly happy and fully satisfied with our life with one another. We planned for the future— intended on spending he rest of our live together, intended to stay just that happy until one day we weren’t. So we didn’t. And though it was only the one thing, at this one time in my life, I have been frozen in that moment ever since.
I think I might have broken free of my pattern, of my desire to stare across the table and wonder if perhaps that this is a substitute, a fruitless swap in my search for the “next best thing.” As I sit here content by myself, in the life thatd I created for myself, I relax. Maybe this right now is the very best thing.