strike that

See How We Are

I woke up and stayed in bed – read and wrote and read some more – and by eleven called my old insightful friend Mo, who was still in his pajamas, too. And he lives on the East Coast.

This is how winter is, he reminded me. Don’t you remember last year? But I always thought of last year as a fluke. I hoped it was a fluke.

This is how it is to be single in winter, he said. And I felt reassured but also bitter. My single friends are newly in couples and my couple friends are newly in hibernation. Here I am alone in the rain and no one will make plans. This is how it goes, he said. He was mostly surprised I hadn’t learned this before.

We played a game called How Long Would It Take For Someone To Notice If You Died, and then I realized I better leave the house.

I went to the coffee shop. I ordered citrusy tea and a dark chocolate brownie and I tried to finish last Sunday’s crossword puzzle, but I was about eight words away. Fuck Being Single, I thought. And then, in a fit of forgetting I was bitter, I talked to the guy sitting across from me. A ream of paper, I asked, is that with an A or an E? And he looked at me like he’d won the lottery.

And that’s about where I remembered it: that I’m good at being single. That I know how to do it, and that sometimes it’s downright fun. That breaking up is hard – No Shit – and that I miss Operaman, no question, but that I am not sad at being single in and of itself. Even though it’s winter.

And then I came home and pulled on my fishnets and my Docs and on my way out the door my housemate said You should party with us more often, and I realized that at thirty one I’m still closer to twenty five than to forty. So I went out dancing with my friend from New Orleans. I drank Makers & Cokes and we danced to John Doe from X, and when he finished we hopped down the street and spun to Prince and Reba until the last bar’s lights came on.

And two thirty was too early so in honor of Mardi Gras we went for a late night snack at the Montage, down under the Morrison Bridge and all full of girls with tight shirts and denim and heels.

And still now here, home at four, I miss Operaman, but newly and refreshingly I don’t miss who I was with him. I was so focused on not hurting him and not fucking with his plans and not freaking him out that I became much smaller than I am. And not once did he ask me to do that, but somehow I fell into it – somehow I assumed that if I stayed my single self I’d constantly be hearing No. And I hate hearing No. I hate that I always hear it and never say it.

So with Operaman I did something unfair to both of us: I reeled myself in to accommodate a respectably conservative schedule and a respectively conservative relationship. I never said Let’s stay out. I never said Let's be bigger. I never said I love you and I don’t give a fuck about your problem set, because here we are both alive at the same time and what are the fucking odds. And it probably wouldn’t have worked for him anyway but at least it would have felt honest.

The point being that now that I'm on my own I remember that actually I'm a lot more kickass than that. And for my next trick I’d like to figure out how to be kickass in a relationship, but for the moment I’ll settle for just kickass, even on my own, even in winter, because Lord knows it’s been a long time gone.

posted by tortaluga @ 4:16 AM