Hold on to your breath— I have news… I met a girl and we
weren’t (I repeat, we WERE NOT) in a vodka pool. Hooray!
She is smart, has a healthy balance, and I really like the way her hips
gently move to the beat of music that’s being piped in. We’re not even gonna go into my jealousy for
that clingy turtle neck that got 1:1 privileges throughout the evening.
“Wow!”
That and more are some of the machinations running through my head while I was gulping for air and watching her make dinner last night. Of
course, the (polite) introvert in me can’t find a way to enunciate those
feelings because I grew up in the South where girls don’t say things like that out loud to people they hardly know. So, I’ve got to work on communicating more concretely*… if we make it to the point where those kinds of thoughts are welcome on the
outside. Right now, we’re interviewing each other for adaptable-enough characteristics, checking for fleas, and offering
reading material to address all the layers of life: head, heart, &
soul.
I’ve been knowing since I left Louisiana that I need to keep
my expectations in check if I meet someone to date, and so I’m using the adage from Terms of Endearment when Debra Winger was dying from cancer and her mom, Shirley McClain, was banging on the nurse's station. As the doctor said to her, I'm saying to myself, "Hope for the best and prepare for the worst." But, this is just love, not cancer, right? This relationship will either:
> get to the next phase
> land in the friend zone, and we will wave to each other
from opposite ends of the same lesbian gathering on some distant day**
I mean, it’s so easy in an all-girl community to just
keep being girl…friends. In fact, the
perks can be better. You get a ton of “extracurricular”
honesty that a girlfriend rarely discovers (until after the breakup). And, there never has to be a breakup. Looking at the event from this perspective, friendship
can be the marathon while swapping intimate energy is merely a sprint.
And, at my age, how do I know I need someone enough to let them in? When
you’re young, there’s that K.D. Lang effect—constant craving. But when older, you enter into a relationship
knowing that those feelings start out innocent and then seduce you into a
vacuum where you lose track of all that you are and can be, bartering your last capsules of hope for one more day of love heroin.
Once that source of euphoric power moves into your heart &/or
bedroom, you’re sliding against the wet slippery sides of an imprisoning tube where benevolent beings didn’t install handles and there doesn’t
seem to be an exit portal until one or the other does something so blatantly unethical
or immoral that there’s a U.S. Postal Address Change Form taped to a suit case at the front door step. Yikes!
How does everything start
out so awesome and end up so not? Is there another way to do this thing called
love? So, I think about that love tube
without handles and I wonder why the Goddess would create such a powerful
experience but not create safeguards.
Doesn’t she love us enough to help us avoid unnecessary heartaches? Then, an idea boomerangs toward me. If we
were able to stop at each good feeling and analyze it, it seems that the experience would
no longer be good or a feeling but merely a one-dimensional thought. Maybe the Goddess wants the mind to think and
the heart to feel, and for both of them to make things work within the same
experiences—without safeguards or advantages, one over the other.
*Note: Thank you Dim Sum for this morning's conversation, "How an abstract person can keep an concrete person's interest."
**Note: Unlike most
multiple choice tests, the longest answer is not necessarily the correct one
