| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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And, honestly, I am thinking about kissing her without reason. We talk and arrives a man with tattoos that creep up from the neck of his shirt and down over his bare arms and ‘LOVE’ and ‘HATE’ on his knuckles and a tiny vagina on his forearm to remind him how much women fucking suck. Or so he says, though it is encased in a heart and I begin to doubt the sentiment which lead to the vagina imprint remains. I fully expect that her interest will stay with the arrived man, a friend of whom she has more current knowledge, but her eyes return to mine. The well inked man goes and sits under a tree and she asks what we are doing and my friend says something about coffee and she says something about how she is tired she could use coffee. In the way she speaks I feel the first vibration of my old familiar friend, the precognition of sexual intercourse. It isn’t something I can explain or even recall in any detail at the moment though the second it appears in me I recognize it and seemingly grow within my skin. Not arousal, not libido in any manner, but a flush of self confidence. Self confidence is easy when you understand your path through the imminent future. Hours or days, it is future outside of time but described as step one followed by step two followed by step three. The LORD made all creation in six days, but the hours each day took is ambiguous. They are days existing outside of time, but rather as an order of events. I fix on her and suddenly my friend is excluded from the conversation. The tunnel forms between she and I. --do you want to join us for coffee? --are you asking for a date? --are you going to put out? --are you buying? --if you put out. She joins us for coffee. We sit in the rear garden of the independent coffee joint on the main drag of the downtown of my hometown. Conversation flows well and I catch her looking at me and I see her differently than I used to. She is hunting down a Ph.D. in History and subbing public school and there is an angle to her eyes I never noticed before. I reach for her purse and touch it and ask her if I could look through it. She doesn’t flinch and immediately says I may so I do. Her passport looks like a young Angelica Houston at first glance though she doesn’t whatsoever. I say so and then she flinches. There is little of interest in her purse. She has longer hair in her photos, I like the shorter hair. I look at her and notice her lips and the urge to kiss her returns. She has a small mouth but full lips work around words, separate to show teeth and the tip of her tongue. I might be staring at her mouth and I blink and rub my eyes and stare into my empty cup. I swirl the cup like there is something left and tilt it back dramatically over my mouth. I’m not fooling anyone. A man with a large head and a small body comes out and lights a cigarette and looks at us. She is looking through the cards in my wallet and has found a block of French and is reading it. I say, Do you read French? And she says, I just did. And I say, I mean, do you understand it? And she says she does. And the man with the large head and the small body asks, What does my last name mean in French? Reveille? She says, To awaken. He asks, What is it in French? She says, Réveiller, with an ‘r’ at the end. Another man walks into the garden and says, I come without party favors. He then proceeds to quote Excalibur as a means to justify the use of the word ‘dullard’ in popular speech. We get up and leave. There are stairs up from the square in the little park that empty onto the next street parallel between the bookstore and the soft-serve ice cream shoppe. We stand in the sun at that point with the understanding that our vehicles are no longer in the same direction. I ask her for her cell phone number and she gives it to me and I enter it and her phone rings and I say, now you have my number. She hugs my friend and then she hugs me and I hug her a little firmer than normal and I feel her palm warm on the small of my back. I sense an immeasurable moment beyond typical. I sense meaning beyond friendly. I walk away wondering if I delude myself. We walk into the parking garage. I explain to my friend that something is bound to happen between she and I. I assume he assumes I am expounding machismo. Towards the end of the night I am in a karaoke lounge watching a large bearded man singing an Irish traditional, ignoring the words changing color on the screen and instead singing his own, bawdy lyric. My pocket vibrates and I pull the phone and look at the display and it is the girl. I leave the lounge and answer the phone. She is drunk. She tells me how good it was to see me. How good I look. How good I always looked. How she was so attracted to me way back when she was the good friend of my ex. This is how I know her, way back when. She was a friend of my then girlfriend. It is in motion. The timing is right, some 70 days since the last one failed. This is how it always happens. But I am unsure that I want it. This one. There are reasons for and against. No reason is substantial, no reason avoids the cloud of my prejudices. When I stand at the top of these hills it is never clear whether I want slide down them because that is the direction I want to go or just because it looks like a hell of a lot of fun. I’ll call her tomorrow or the next day. Just to see what happens. Without expectations. |
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I seem to have foreknowledge to make me believe I could end my drought tonight. A quick kiss this afternoon followed by a few hours of sexual tension followed by release in the cab of my truck after sunset on a cliff above the ocean. It could happen that way and I am thinking that I don’t want it to. In my head that would yield a short relationship, no more than a month or two. Shallow, passionate sex forming the core, a weak foundation that is not meant to last and will not last and what’s the fucking point? An alternate pursuit would involve a practice of patience and a limit of physical activity and my interest, which seems genuine, in deepening my knowledge of this woman. There is a dull but present fear that rises in me when I think about this. About investing anything of me in this woman, any woman. Setting myself up for to possibility of another round of relational despair. And it isn’t a safe venture. The reality of that possibility exists in a significant way in my head. I know that my ex doesn’t like this woman, an alienation of friendships. Rumored promiscuity and whispered infidelity, all heresy but capable of ringing the alarm bells. Faintly. Do I hear them and accept them and not flee from them because I don’t trust the sources to be current and I want to learn about this woman and formulate my own opinion? Or do I ignore the alarms because I am blinded by vagina and writing my own story and simply dumb in a typical nate fashion? I am stunted, slightly, in my response. I hold myself back, I hold myself safe. I am not willing to dive into anything new. But I also find myself less cynical and less defeatist. I am willing to believe in a possibility of something here. I was draining my head awhile ago, ranting on my general distrust of women (and people) and my despair and the absence of desire to enter into a relationship. To make the effort and risk the pain. A good friend reminded me “There’s no guarantee you won’t be hurt or betrayed again by women … No one has that guarantee. Why should you be so special? Go out and live, damn it. Go get your heart crushed again and again!” Another good friend said, “having baggage is just, it's lame. it's cliché.” So, I don’t know. I am going to do everything I can to see this woman in her own light tonight. I am trying to go without preconceived notions of how the night should progress, without prejudice. I want to know who she is. I can’t invest much into her until I do, which I do not believe is baggage, but rather how I should have been handling my relations with women all along. No more stories that I write and fall in love with. |
i'm just sayin |
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but not in the same night. |
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what i wouldn't give to understand better the mind of men, what they think on a date, what they like, what they don't, what they want, what they think of you, what it takes to keep their attention. every one is so different. there's no standard lock and key. |
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my wife keeps my attention simply by breathing, and thats my point. otherwise, its not her fault, nor should she bend over backwards to try and keep my attention. if it doesnt flow.... somethings in a relationship should be effortless. |
I kept checking the basketball scores on my first date with sem. He thought he was blowing it. He wasn't. I'm just easily distracted. |
just retarded. |
"I can’t invest much into her until I do, which I do not believe is baggage, but rather how I should have been handling my relations with women all along" I agree. That's not baggage; that is keeping a healthy guard up. The term "baggage" has been rendered almost meaningless. That is not to minimize whatever emotional problems that any one person is dealing with that may make having intimate relationships difficult, but it seems that, these days, everyone has "baggage" or "issues" of some kind...at least all the interesting people do. "But I also find myself less cynical and less defeatist." I felt like that once but it was just gas. "I am willing to believe in a possibility of something here." <i'm just grinning> |
so this is something that i wonder about. it's like interviewing for jobs. i am the same person with the same interview suit using the same resume for five different job interviews. i answer the questions the same. one employer thinks i'm technically adept but that i dont have enough creative or design skills. another employer thinks i'm creative but not "techie" enough. obviously there are a million different factors that come into play when someone is interviewing you for a job and how they perceive you, your skills, and your motivations during and after the interview. what are those factors? it's the same in dating. one guy makes me really nervous, because he's totally hot and the chemistry between us is amazing and he's confident and a little on the wild side and all my friends think he's wonderful. so yeah, he makes me nervous and self conscious and maybe i behave a little differently around him that i have other guys i've dated. but what does this guy like? how does he read me? what is the one thing that i've done that causes him not to call me again? it's impossible to tell. but reading the above posts from 8 and nate - at least i feel like i'm getting a tiny peek into the keyhole. |
I am spoiled. |
other person is very into you and you can have anything you want from them as long as you decide what it is ;) |
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