Inertia

A warning sign,
I missed the good part then I realized,
I started looking and the bubble burst.
I started looking for excuses.

Time was limited by the demands of little children but somehow there was managed ninety minutes for pizza and iced tea at a restaurant so overcrowded and under-soundproofed that we had to lean across the table to hear one another speak. Far from being a bad thing, this allowed us to have a surprisingly intense conversation that ranged from children to work to previous partners to the mechanics of squirting, all while the little old lady seated not two feet over put away two foamy glasses of beer without once casting an eye in our direction.

When the date was through immediately plans were laid for more; a comment on my part about how difficult scheduling is with children in the mix was batted back by him with a joke involving math.

A joke. Involving math. Color me impressed!

Nevertheless I am testing him. What might sound like casual conversation is actually a checklist I am going through, question by question — and he is doing shockingly well. Somehow there has been achieved a balance between I-want-to-fuck-your-brains-out and I-want-to-know-your-brain, and is there in all this a hint of I-pretend-to-want-to-know-your-brain-just-to-get-at-your-cunt? No. No there is not, at least so far as my bullshit detectors can read. They are by this point, one hopes, adequately adjusted.

(I picture not the white lies of misreported motivation or misremembered location but weapons-grade lies: lies about birth, death and every sacrament in between. These are the lies that worry, and at this point I don’t know how anyone anywhere gets answers to their questions without fear of subterfuge. Do other people do background checks? Demand full names so as to enact furious Googlesearches? I do not know. I just do not know.)

Apparently I am done for now with fuck-first-ask-questions-later, which may prove deleterious to your continued enjoyment of this weblog but advantageous where relations with my mother are concerned. What happened? Where did that girl go? Four years ago I hauled out my tits for inspection by a room full of strangers, one of whom spent the next hour screwing me senseless beneath the world’s cheesiest mirrored ceiling. Now — now the idea of getting naked with someone who is new, someone who is so different in so many ways from anyone else I’ve ever dated, frankly terrifies me. I can’t focus my thoughts on it at all; if I do my brain says Me and the vibrator are doing just fine, thank you very much. We’ve got matters well in hand¹.

But as I am not made for marriage, I am also not made for permanent singlehood, at least not now. Also he goes to work in goggles and a lab coat. Also as we leaned across the table there was some slight touching of fingers, and it felt good. Also he loves Buffy.

It’s worth the terror, right?

1. Ha [↩]