I've done this one a couple times before, but this time is special! I'm practicing it so I can teach it to Dreamy Playlist Angel next time we hang out! It's one of the easiest ones to practice on myself, but I look forward to trying the cute weave that Rory does in the back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADN90FVYty0
It's been a few weeks since I did my Wednesday night ritual, and it made my brain feel...organized. Serene. Grounded. I just got a bunch of candles out of the Christmas stuff, so I had the scents of raspberry, cupcakes, and sangria all at once. Sweetness all around.
Some rope nights are about ravishing myself in all the ways, but this was more of a spa-evening. I brought a cute book upstairs to read, my favorite romcom author.
My smaller cat doesn't need to be crated during ropes, and it was lovely having her snuggle up to my face while I was reading. I spent the evening feeling cozy and celebrated, and then I slept so, so well.
Friends! I had such a cute rope date on Friday! Maybe I'll tell you all about Dreamy Playlist Angel sometime, but first I want to wrap up another story.
So, a couple weeks ago, I sold my dear red car. It was hard to let go, but she was costing me like 1500$ a repair visit. I need to be saving up and improving my credit in case I need to move (Because rent keeps going up, not because of Guy Next Door) so BFF-Formerly-Sweetie is very generously letting me share her car.
So that meant that, because BFF does poll work on Election Day, I didn't have a car last Tuesday. It was a particularly stressful workday, fun but with lots of moving parts. So I was dazed and a little giddy when I was getting in my Lyft at the end of the day. The backseat door handles were the hidden kind, I still don't understand where they were. I got in the car a little flustered, just wanting to go vote and then take the most emphatic nap ever.
The driver was cute and maybe mid-thirties, and his day job was adjacent to mine-lots to bond about on the short ride. He bragged that (swoon) he'd voted first thing in the morning, and I told him that's where I was headed after home. I put my chitchat on autopilot and listened to his answers, each one more charming than the last. But my head was all swirly from work, from the person who would come to be Dreamy Playlist Angel, about how pretty the bright yellow fall trees were, about how good it would feel to lay down and take my scheduled after-work nap.
When I got in the door, I discovered that my phone was not in my purse. Or in the pockets on the outside of my lunch bag. It wasn't in my hoodie pockets, and there weren't any pockets in my very work pants-y work pants. I had left my phone in the cute driver's car.
Okay. Well, I had my laptop, so I hopped on customer support and reported my lost phone. The driver wrote back pretty quickly that he had the phone, just needed my address to bring it back. And I would be charged an extra 20$ for his time--so fair! But there was a glitch and the chat with the driver cut off. By the time I started the request again, both my address and the driver's number became unavailable. I needed a phone to get my phone back.
I almost kinda begged for them to do it by email instead, but they couldn't. Online impossibility is my worst trigger, so I let myself melt down for a few minutes, a good scream-cry and lay on the floor combo. Then I got up, wiped my face, and resumed trying to solve the mystery of how to get my phone back.
There are five apartments in this complex, four sets of very lovely Weak Tie neighbors who would have been more than happy to help, and Guy Next Door, who had *just* gotten back from a monthlong yoga retreat. I was feeling like we could be on good terms, but I didn't want to find out in the middle of an internet void meltdown.
So, in the latest installment of the demented romcom that is my life sometimes, I knocked on his door. He opened it, smiling and smelling of after-work weed. He was in his work clothes too--like we were both in our cosplay as grownups.
He gave me a hug and agreed to help right away. I invited him in and we sat at my very cluttered table, covered in everything I'd just dumped out of my purse, some undies and socks that needed to be folded, and various other midweek detritus. I was behind on the dishes as always, so I hoped he wasn't too grossed out by my perpetual Dishhenge.
I told the very unhelpful Lyft chat that I had access to a phone now, but they told me I had to re-report it, but the reporting-it link kept looping back to the unhelpful chat. There wasn't anything I could do at that moment but to stare at the void. And catch up with Guy Next Door.
I told him I was sorry for being a jerk, and he said, "Even if you were a jerk, I'm here for it. I just like being your friend,"
!!!!!!
While I went a few more rounds with The Void on my laptop, I was so happy to be updated about GNS's adventures! And he was an excellent emotional support neighbor! He looked up my very uncalm calm-down song:
I had him set a timer for me (he picked singing bowls) so I could only try my futile online quest for eight more minutes instead of looping around on it eternally. He had some helpful ideas to try, but he is tech support, not Void Support. When the timer went off, I said goodbye and a million thank-yous and went off to vote.
Voting is a big social event in my neighb, and it cheered me up a bunch. As I was walking back from the polling place, I heard a man's voice saying "You!" in just the cutest way.
It was the Lyft driver. He'd been driving around for an hour trying to figure out where he'd dropped me off. He remembered I'd said I was going to vote, so he thought he would ask around at my polling place to see if anyone knew how to find me! He said if that didn't work, he was going to go back to my work and drop it off there! My HERO!
OF COURSE I asked for his number--I can never resist a possible meet-cute! We exchanged numbers and I went home, elated to tell GNS that all was well, delighted to have voted, and very, very ready for gummies and Gilmores and sleep.
It wasn't a meet-cute with the Lyft driver, just a golden moment of possibility that made me feel so entertained and hopeful and silly. So that's where I am now. I wonder what will happen next.
Definitely watch Nobody Wants This, it's so cute!!!
I never wrote about my second date with The Southern Charmer, way back in 2022, because it spooked me all to heck. There was a thing that happened sometimes post-quarantine where a date would just get here and get immediately so relaxed that they were like human lofi, so calm and self-contained as to be unreachable.
The Southern Charmer had tried a new kind of gummy and it had just zapped him entirely! Now that I've spent a few Friday nights in a woozy D8 haze listen-dozing to the 99% Invisible breakdown of The Power Broker, I understand a little better, but that night, it was startling!
I lay with him chastely as he rode it out, scared and ashamed of how actually helpless this person in my bed was! Once he was alert enough, he went home. I thought he had taken an Uber, but it turned out that he drove.
So the next day, once I knew he was alright, I let him go with a few (I hope) gentle texts. His tuned-outness really freaked me out, and I felt ashamed and worried that I'd let him drive home in that state.
Since then, I've remembered him as beautiful and sweet and just not in the right place for me. Good job me, I guess? The eyes-on-the-prize recognition that he wasn't the one for me, amazing! Stars all around.
But a thing he said to me in his hazy time really stuck in my mind, probably unfairly. "This is all too much" he said, and he could have just meant *gestures widely* but it hit my heart as meaning that I was too much. I worried about that, not being too much physically but just being too intense or whatever to really be in relationships. I still worry about that all the time.
I wrote some blog posts about being part Kaiju, a regular refrain. "Too much" stuck with me like a splinter.
But when The Southern Charmer popped up again this year around my birthday, I had a different perspective--I'm a stoner now too! It was so appealing to bond over the 15-25 milligrams of peace I've been enjoying every night, and a nice fantasy to think about sharing that feeling with somebody pretty and kind.
And here we were! Making out on the couch without one single care in the world. My body, heart, mind, and soul were all aligned and ungrasping (except literally I mean), all together an open gate. I felt one wholehearted emotion and that was...welcome!
I felt so far outside the everyday concerns of dating, like all the baggage of these last thirteen years just clocked out for al little bit. I was innocent and free. I felt filled up with trust and happiness and ***friendship***. The Southern Charmer made me feel so safe and seen and embraced. It was a profound relief to rest in him. In us.
The kissing on the couch lasted so beautifully long. Kissing like nothing bad had ever happened to us. Kissing like we had all the time in the world, and we did.
Throughout the whole one million years year
that I’ve been broken up with The Shy One (Two months longer than we’d been
together! I feel so impatient with this process!) I feel like I maintained some
sort of dignity about the situation. At least, as much dignity as one can have
while writing a million paragraphs and creating however-many art projects about
a beloved ex a guy who dumped me right before Valentine’s Day.
I’ve been so strong, even with the Christmas mushroom
gummies and the letters and the unblockings and reblockings and the endless
wondering what to do with the just-not-my-style jewelry set he brought me back
from his trip home. (Resolved: Even though if I wore it I would look like a
deranged, appropriating haunt from the Island of the Well-Meaning-White Ladies,
it’s beautiful and special and I’m keeping it. I’ll probably hang the earrings
on the Christmas tree next year.) I’ve had, for the most part, willpower.
Sometimes I was a bitch, sometimes just unbearably nakedly needy, but still, with
some underlying dignity.
Until this year’s Valentine’s Day. I blame the movie Valentine’s
Day—it’s a fave, but this Valentine’s lunch time, it really twisted the
knife. Maybe it was a knife that needed twisting.
There’s this part where Bradley Cooper is telling Julia
Roberts about his breakup and she says something like:
“Nothing to be done?”
And that just struck the saddest chord on the lobby
piano in the overpopulated hotel that is my heart. I STILL think there’s
something I could have done, some part of me I could have folded up and put
away (Maybe in with the Christmas ornaments?) so that he wouldn’t have left me.
In the background of all the love and joy and growth and vexation of time
moving forward, my brain is still whirring away on that puzzle. I sincerely
hope it will stop doing that someday.
I decided to be sad for a few minutes on the way to my
evening job. I’d (Fit of well-being! Optimism! The life changing magic of tidying
up my Spotify lists!) deleted my Grief Walk mix but, uh, luckily? There
was this new single from Usher featuring Burna Boy, Coming Home. It
devastated me all the way to my bones. It made me want to find The Shy One and just let him consume me until there was nothing left. I
looked up the lyrics and it says “not just leave you for dead.” But metaphorically
that’s what I wanted, to be so deep in shock and love and sex as to evaporate all
the way to heaven and stay there this time, not drift back to reality and a Shy
One QUICKLY getting his pants on to go, that last time.
It's fine, I can drive to work and self-immolate at
the same time!
I knew there couldn’t be any seeking-out-and-being-consumed,
so I did something maybe even less advisable—I looked at his Instagram in the
few minutes before work started. There wasn’t much to see there, but there was
this:
March 15, 2023, a little more than a month after we broke
up. A stupid, generic meme saying “That feeling when everything’s just coming
together.”
I know he wasn’t posting it AT me, but fuck you, dude.
While I was raking the back terrace listening to fucking A Grief Observed, while
I was going back to Unitarian Church to feel less isolated and alone, while I
was planning to commemorate our first date/the first day of Ramadan with a
street art project, his life had found exactly where it needed to be, at least
in that moment of posting.
And I’m so mad at myself because the feeling he was
having in that basic-as-fuck meme, it’s a feeling I wish for him! For everyone
I love. It’s a great fucking feeling that everyone deserves. Resenting him for
that moment of epiphany makes me seem so curdled and rotten, and in that moment,
I was.
I reunlocked his WhatsApp thread and sent at desperate
and devastated few questions, followed, not too long later, by an “Oops, please
disregard.”
I had a coffeeshop maybe-a-date yesterday with a guy I’ve
been interested in for a while. I was rom-com awkward and klutzy. He was either
very gentlemanly or not interested, maybe both. But my body gave me very good
news: I AM READY TO DO ALL THE THINGS!
We had a perfectly lovely and polite time talking
about all kinds of things. He’s a writer too! He has a cool project going that
he is super-passionate about, what could be more dreamy than that?!
I was tooooooooootally listening to what he was saying
but also, his hands. So big. So thick. So strong-looking. Oh boy.
Oh my. Oh swoon. Oh my goodness.
“These are very good hands,” I said “I bet they’re
very good for…hitting people. Like, on the butt.”
In fairness to my shy phrasing, the coffeeshop was
close to home and there was the real possibility of work clients overhearing. Despite
my awkwardness, he briefly wove our fingers together, like a combination of a
hand-hug and a vote of confidence. Yep, strong.
He had a call to get to (Or, “had a call” like a
get-out-of-date-free card?) so I didn’t get to take him home. (In a gentle show
of optimism, I had sort of tidied.) Instead, I stopped at the store to buy
myself flowers and had a VERY pleasant nap.
Ohfriends. It might not be this guy, but it’s gonna be
somebody. And they better WATCH OUT.
Last Saturday when I was planning my self-date night
to go see Downton Abbey: A New Era, I knew there were plenty of movie
theaters with parking lots, with big cozy seats, with pretty good mojitos. But
I wanted to go to The Artsy Theater, my favorite.
It was the one where I sobbed a whole lifetime at the
end of Boyhood not long after one of my cats passed away. The one where
I saw Her and decided I should break up with the boyfriend who existed
only on Twitter, then put off doing that for a while longer. It was where I
took comfort in the absurd romance of The French Dispatch while I was
getting over The Good Boy.
(It was also where I was subjected to a Woody Allen trailer
while awaiting The French Dispatch—why does such a thing even still
exist? What the heck, Artsy Theater?!)
But! They keep the Junior Mints in the freezer there,
and they have so many flavors of hot chocolate, which I never try, because let’s
be honest I need coffee to stay up past 9:30, especially in the dark.
So I guess the main swoon in this story is for the
theater itself, but when I walked in a little early for my 9:20 movie there was
The Song Sender, looking exactly as he had in 2011 when he said goodbye.
“I’ve seen you on every dating app!” I blurted out,
because if I’m going to live in a romcom I’m going to bring the awkward.
I had though. The last time I’d seen him, on Feeld, he
was even in my “likes you” folder, with his girlfriend right there in the
profile with him. The Song Sender, who’d dumped me ostensibly about monogamy,
had been brought to the poly team, maybe by this nice lady I should’ve snooped
more about before I sent him to the left. I thought he would probably be too
rough for me these days, but the update and the “like” gave me a nonzero amount
of joy.
Anyway, back to the movies, I went over and sat down
next to him, and my body didn’t think he seemed too rough at all. I felt cozy
and oriented, both like no time had passed and like forever had. I caught a
little whiff of the smell of him and it gave me a sense of surety and happiness.
I sure wasn’t woozy or helpless the way I’d been back in my 2011-and-headed-towards-divorce
apartment with him.
It took me a few minutes of being fairly inappropriate
before he told me he was at work and therefore couldn’t tell me every detail of
his adventures like I’d asked. I still showed him my hidden photos folder with
some of my rope creations, and he unsurprisingly liked them.
As I was going into the movie, he snapped a selfie of
the two of us because his girlfriend wanted to know who this girl was who was showing
him pictures. I gave him my number, which felt both like a crazy thing to do
and the most natural thing in the world. Whether as a friend or as a…whatever,
he was missing from me and now he isn’t.
The movie was perfect, of course, and so was the rest
of my date with myself. I walked a dreamy few blocks through the historic
district to my favorite bus route, which I love even more than I love The Artsy
Theater. When I walked from my bus stop to home, the moon was almost full and
big in the sky. The flowering trees were giving off their late-night smells. I
saw my first lightning bug of the season.
That walk from the bus stop made me sure that whatever
happens with any character, past, present, or future, it’s within my power to
make this a Summer of Romance for myself. So in the name of the Dowager
Countess and the first firefly of the season, that’s exactly what I resolve to
do.
