A Strange Night

I've reached the one year anniversary of being completely and entirely on my own and alone.  I'm not sure how I managed it and I still wonder where the strength comes from just to fall out of bed and get to work most days.  Since my desire to do any sort of regular blogging is essentially non existent, it seemed the right thing was to close the chapter on my other blog and use this more as an online journal.  As with most of my attempts at journaling, it will be infrequent, it will be raw, it will be unfiltered, and probably vulgar.  This isn't a place where I'll be explaining things so as to keep a readership, just writing them down in the hopes that maybe one day they will make sense.  It is my mirror of my self... my reality check.

It was an odd night last night, almost as if the cosmos is trying to tell me something but we aren't quite on the same wavelength yet for me to clearly get the message.  Just a brief catch up... even since hanging out my own shingle I've been depressingly unable to land any sort of dates, or even a circle of friends, to be "normal" with.  I can count on 3 fingers the number of guys I landed a date with in the last 12 months, 1 finger the number that resulted in a return encounter or several, and 2 fingers the number that resulted in any sort of physical intimacy or sense of emotional intimacy.  It's official, my love life is completely and totally dead... bury it now, the stink is just too much!  I just seem to sink further and further in to the whole of despair I began digging some 16 years ago.  I mentioned to dad, he being ever the optimist, that I've stopped looking for a partner or even casual relationship in hopes that maybe it would psychologically set me up to "find love when I least expect it."  Of course it was his fatherly wisdom 'not to give up', a noble attempt to cheer me up.  At least when there are no expectations there can be no qualifications that I'm a failure.. or so I thought.

This wall that I tore down while coming out opened up a piece of my soul that I never could before acknowledge.  After such lengthy repression it is no surprise that the ache I feel in my heart and to the deepest corners of my "core" and my center of being cannot be ignored or suppressed.  This part of me has gone beyond yearning, and seeking.  I cannot tell myself any longer to "be patient" or use any of the usual cliche's or mantras we induce to get ourselves to refocus energies elsewhere to things we can control.  I'm finding that I am less and less able to keep control of my emotional ballast and the intensity of previously suppressed emotion and passion.  Its like a balloon being overfilled and the rupture is eminent.  It feels that I'm on the verge of a complete and total emotional break down - and I know it would not be one I bounce back from. 

That's enough self analysis...  If I snap there are few who would care anyhow so, what the hell, bring that on too!  Back to the weirdness of the cosmos...

Its not often I do late night grocery shopping on the weekend.  Once I get to Sunday afternoon and evening I'm ready just to call it a day and kiss it off.  But not this weekend.  There just wasn't anything left to make lunch for the week, so I had to get the flip flops on and head down the street to my neighborhood QFC.  My pessimism has long over ruled the romantic notion of random encounters with true love at such public places.  These silly insipid twinges of "finding the one" just around the corner are done.  I don't hope nor expect to meet anyone I know or want to get to know in any of my usual or unusual places - it just doesn't happen for me.

Perhaps it really is the onset of my insanity to think I saw out of the corner of my eye while in the produce section some one I was deeply interested in dating but never managed to get past the first date.  How odd it is that such a thing would happen on a 1 year anniversary of the original event (or damn close to it).  How even more odd, cosmologically thinking, that after trying to convince myself I'm really starting to go off the deep end where, just by coincidence, I find myself watching a new movie whose distilled wisdom is don't walk away from your opportunities when they happen.  How odd, that if he was really there, that when trying to look in that direction so as to get a proper look to test my sanity, there was no one there.  Could he have seen me before I properly saw him and had that "oh shit" panic moment of "let's avoid this situation?"  Am I really so hideous that I'm not even worth a friendly "hello" anymore even if we can't be anything more than friends?  My ears and self worth no longer affirm the comments from so many others that "you're so cute and smart I'd totally date you."  Words are, in fact, quite cheap and indispensable --I should know since I use so many in my head.  I look for more than just words, I look for the action to follow the word through.

After meeting Rob and getting to know each other over dinner a year ago, I gave myself a great deal of hope and saw the moment then as a positive affirmation that making the move to town was the right choice.  I even gave a relationship a pretty large potential at that point too.  I mean how many dudes would hop off their bike while you're walking home to introduce themselves and go out of their way to tell you "I look forward to dinner with you."  It just doesn't happen in this town, its not normal!  Despite what I thought was a great evening, ending with a hug followed by a fist bump and "lets keep in touch" ....with only a single text since that evening--I naively thought there was a chance.  After getting over that seeming dead end (with great sadness I'll add), I never gave him much thought until last night and in the weirdness of last night.  The disasters with Navy guy and Party boy were great tumultuous distractions from my first crushing blow being a new city boy.

But now I seem to be in a permanent dating drought.  And there is no relief in sight.  Maybe insanity is the only way out...