Being Single
One of the things I swore to myself upon coming out of an awful relationship (that capped almost a decade of serial dating/relationship experiences) was that I would remain single until at least the end of the year.
This is one of those things you swear, like when you decide you are gonna cut down on sugar, fatty foods, and whiskey, like when you decide you are gonna exercise more. Like when you decide to do anything you know you should do but are not 100% convinced you really want to do.
The pluses:
- Being unemployed doesn’t matter. Not being able to pay for dates or take a woman places doesn’t matter when you don’t have a woman to take out.
- I never have to clean my room.
- I have the opportunity to get my life together outside of the dating dynamic.
- I am not working my ass off to prove myself to somebody who doesn’t appreciate me anyway.
Wait, was that emotional baggage? Oops. Right, this isn’t about the women I have already been with.
The minuses:
- No girl to crawl into bed with. I am not just talking about sex. I am talking about that feeling when I walk into a room and know a woman I adore is in the bed I am about to fall into. I miss that feeling of wrapping myself around a sleepy girl, of enjoying the way she feels, the way she smells before I drift off to sleep.
- No sex. Just because it wasn’t necessarily an element of the above doesn’t mean it’s not an element. My mouth and my hands miss skin. My ears miss sounds. I am not going to tell you what my tongue misses, but you can guess.
- No license to stare. I don’t know about you, but I love looking at the women I am with. If I could I would just rest my chin on my hand and look. They put up with that better if they are sleeping with me.
- No license to tell her how hot I think she is. Generally, I don’t get to tell the devastatingly hot women around me how lovely I think they are (apart from those friends who think —tragically—that I am harmless). When I am dating I get to do that. Regularly.
- I miss having somebody I can wrap myself around, or grab by her belt loop and pull toward me. I miss finding dark corners for smooches and looking across the room to see that she is just as distracted as I am at the idea of those smooches. I miss that level of intimacy.
But where was I? Oh yeah, remaining single until the end of the year.
How am I supposed to do that when I find myself so totally enchanted? Some rules were made to be broken. Those rules include reducing: sugar, butter, bacon, whiskey, and women.
Sliding Doors
I seem to have been focusing on the whole joblessness thing here, so maybe this is off topic.
But when I got off the train today the first person I ran into (that I knew) was my ex.
Now, I don’t know about you, but regardless of how I feel about an ex, there is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in just walking past somebody when that somebody was, until recently, a somebody I used to walk to, wrap my arms around, and kiss.
Was that an unnecessarily long sentence or is it just me?
It’s odd to just walk past somebody when you know how her body fits into yours, how her hair feels between your fingers, and how her lips feel against yours. It’s odd to walk past her with a wry smile and not stop, and not say hi, and not touch her.
And in that moment, it almost doesn’t matter how it ended. And it almost doesn’t matter that she was abusive, and that she blamed you for your reactions to that abuse, and that she even went so far as to fictionalize your past in order to relieve herself of accountability. In that moment, all you know is that you know what it would be like to walk up to her and greet her with the love you felt until recently…
And then you find yourself a block away, and heading toward friends and pint-sized drinks and feeling your body tense up as reality pushes the past away, smacks you on the ass, and tells you it wants cream and sugar in its coffee.
