On Thursday evenings during the busy part of the year, I try to stop everything and make some art. Whenever I want to get to know somebody, friend or date, I invite them to join.
The Guy Next Door came across the yard to my door with a gardening book he'd picked out from one of the VERY numerous Little Free Libraries on our surrounding blocks. He showed me an illustration of a wall garden he wanted to create "for us both to enjoy."
(Ladies and gentlehumans of the kitten jury, I submit this as evidence that I wasn't crazy for thinking he might like me back! Not that you asked to see evidence!)
He sat down at my table. I played my summer camp playlist, skipping the songs that felt too emo or too harsh for the occasion. We were doing watercolors and it was just...it was so easy. He talked so freely and I felt so comforted by how open he was about his life. Divorce, love, disappointment, sobriety (of the California sort). It felt so easy to share my own stuff back without feeling like it was too much, like I was too much.
All that sharing made me powerfully smitten, so fast! I knew I couldn't fling myself at him because I wasn't ready and he's LITERALLY my next door neighbor. (In retrospect, flinging might have been the safer choice.) Instead I made plans like this:
"If I knew you better, I'd scoop you up and take you to the beach with me on Sunday. Let's stay friends for at least a year so we can have a beach day next summer. You drive so I can be high on the way home. We'll listen to Atavista by Childish Gambino."
"Okay, I can do that!" He seemed happy to be included in my weirdly specific daydream. Art night dream.
I had tickets to a little-bit-out-of-town showing of Fire Walk With Me, my favorite David Lynch movie and maybe the second-scariest movie ever. (First place goes to The Blair Witch Project.) "If I knew you better, " I said, "I'd give you my extra ticket because (BFF Formerly Sweetie) does NOT care. I see us at a David Lynch event someday, you as the Log Lady and me as... I don't know, I'll have to pick a less obscure character than I usually do."
Typing these visions of the future, they feel more than a little nutso, but I promise, he looked so happy about these plans. He was, as they say on My Brother, My Brother, and Me, playing in the space with me.
I forgot to feel embarrassment or shame for being so enthusiastic and nakedly fascinated by him. (If there had been real nakedness, I think things might have gone better. OR worse! Who knows.)
He seemed nakedly fascinated by me too. (I wonder if that was just the fact that he was higher than me. As OCD therapy would say, maybe, maybe not.) Under his gaze, I bounced. I rocked. I fell into special interest holes and he said he was happy to fall down in there with me. I was giddy with unmasking, and he seemed to be in a giggly joyful state as well. Maybe he was. Maybe it was real, at least this part.
Mostly he sat across the table from me, but sometimes he came over next to me and we sat stonedly shoulder to shoulder. When he was leaving, he gave me a hug that just crossed the boundary over to sensual--his fingers moved over my shoulders in a desire way? Or just it was that over-familiar weedy hippie-boy hug that used to send me into an anti-Platonic tizzy in my college hometown in the mid-Nineties.
Maybe my evidence isn't incontrovertible, but I really want to convince you this wasn't just me fooling myself for the millionth time.
Yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment