The State of Our Union

I’m taking the day off today. I have 10 comp hours that will expire on Friday and it’s supposed to be sunny. But right now it’s cloudy, maybe it’ll just be warm… that will do. I’m going to walk to Natasha’s for a blind date with someone wearing jeans and a Harley jacket and has taken women’s studies and interpersonal communication from my old professor. She asked me the other night at Muscle Mania class if I was dating anyone… I told her I was just getting rid of a bad boyfriend. She told me she knew someone I might like to meet and I gave her my email address. Now I’m going to a lunch date with someone who is fifty and has three children and is semi-retired and going to college and broke off a relationship with a girlfriend last spring and recently lost weight on an Adkins diet. So, I know a bit. But, I don’t know if he is bald, or tiny, or too tall, or pock marked. I must rely on my friend to have used her better judgment with all that. The only concern she voiced was that he might be more conservative than me. I’d laughed at that and boasted, “most people are more conservative than me”.
“Well, he can’t be that conservative… he went to see the Vagina Monologues with me and Joy… and he seemed to enjoy that” she tried to correct her perception. I’ve never seen the Vagina Monologues so the only information I can glean from that is that he would go to a play and to anything with the word vagina in it and that he’s gone out with my married professor and her single friend. So, my first thought is, “why didn’t Joy like him?” Maybe he didn’t like Joy.
I should be thinking about what I’m going to wear… contacts and running shoes. The truth is I don’t care. It would take a miracle for me to care about this man. I’m still deep in the murky waters off the shore of Scott-land.

He called on Monday night. At first I didn’t want to pick up the phone. I still didn’t know what I wanted to say to him. Hadn’t I already said everything that needed to be said in my eloquent one-page letter? Apparently not because we talked for over an hour with a brief five-minute recess when I told him, “I’m going to hang up on you now”. We talked about our relationship; how he wanted it to be just about sex with “no strings attached”… his favorite phrase of the night. Early in the conversation he’d referred to what he wanted from the relationship as “boundaries”. I’d laughed and told him, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I have absolutely no boundaries”. He’d laughed, too and said, “Yeah, I guess I have noticed that.”

The conversation was filled with flirtation and seduction, and both of us admitting our weaknesses, and me trying to sell my vision of our relationship to him. He didn’t buy it. Two or three times he came close to coming over; once he even invited me to his house. When I said I was coming he quickly withdrew his offer. That’s when I hung up.

I went and ran a bath and poured in sea salts. I was angry and it felt good. I brought the phone in with me so I could call Sweet Pea and tell her every nuance of the conversation and have her help me decipher his incomprehensible behavior. He called back before the tub was filled. I told him I couldn’t hear him because my bath water was running… and within minutes we were flirting again. He tried one more time to see if he could come over with “no strings attached” and then admitted that we weren’t going to come to a compromise. I told him I thought this was a good place to end our conversation. For the most part it had been amicable and unresolved. I love the way he looks, talks, dances, kisses, thinks, hugs, smells, laughs, sings, smiles, jokes and tastes and although I’m fairly certain I couldn’t stand to live with him, I want to spend more time with him. He doesn’t love me but enjoys getting drunk, he calls it intoxicated, and having sex with me. He wants to have fun with no drama, and absolute freedom to come and go as he likes.
There is no compromise.