Seventh Date Tears, Part One

 

As I picked up coffee and scones for our mini-road-trip date, I yammered through the pickup window to the barista about how nervous I was. (I had also been panicky for a day or so about unrelated things, I maybe should have scaled back or postponed this big-step date!) This Charming Man is already gone and I’d only just learned how he takes his coffee. I am absolutely devastated and having the HARDEST time not just calling him up and saying “PLEASE.” Please what, I don’t know. Just please.

When I picked him up, we happily kissed hello but it was a little like having one feral cat in the passenger seat and another in the driver’s seat. He had the energy of one of those Garfield toys they used to suction-cup to car windows in the Eighties, just absolutely ready to escape. I wish I would have paused and asked him why he was so jangled. He second-guessed my driving (he doesn’t drive) and kept listing off accidents he had seen around home. I gave him the AMAZING lemon poppyseed scones I’d brought because! Special occasion! And he said “I thought we were going to eat.” Right or wrong, my jangled brain registered that as food-shaming. Whatever it was, I would have liked it to be a “thank you.”

We were going to eat. When he asked me out for Friday-day, I’d gotten up the courage to invite him to have lunch with me at my favorite fancy garden, about an hour away. I wanted to hold hands with him, kiss against trees, and try not to take too many pictures so I could pay good attention to him. This garden is my happy place, and I’ve only ever taken one other date there. (https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2015/09/in-which-i-realize-how-lucky-i-am-to.html?zx=fec1588cfc2887d4)

This Charming Man, with maybe the exception of this particular day, is PRESENT AS FUCK. It’s what made sex with him, most things with him, so dazzling, so seemingly almost loving, right from the start. Somewhere in ouroff-kilter start-of-the-trip conversation, he said a thing he’d said before, that hadn’t sounded so alarming before I’d fallen for him. In order to give his full attention to The Moment, he doesn’t think of people when they are not there. (“Have you heard of mindfulness?” was the start of this conversation.) I said it didn’t seem like he wasn’t thinking of me because of what an attentive texter her was, but he insisted. And I started to cry. And he second-guessed my driving some more.

I know my heart tends to go too fast, but I thought I was doing better this time!

I kind of wish I’d turned the car around at this point, just gotten us home from this already somehow painful day, but I didn’t want to let him go. I tried to tell him what was the matter, that I’d been going about my own life daydreaming about him. Part of me was with him when he was working or running his D&D games or just doing whatever, but he claimed not to think of me at all. Or, in fairness, anyone else when they weren’t around.

I don’t know why, after a brief break to cry in a Kohls’ parking lot, I still kept driving toward the flowers.