You are currently browsing the daily archive for May 1st, 2009.
I can go days with nothing interesting happening, then wham, like a whirlwind, everything picks up. I think the caffeine is typing these letters. I don’t even know what’s going on.
A good friend of mine called me just as I was leaving work yesterday; she broke off her engagement. That’s huge. Sometimes I think things happen, I think we suffer things, for reasons we can’t even begin to understand; I think sometimes there are webs that catch our thoughts and our fears and turn corners on our experiences so that those big mistakes and gross miscalculations become, suddenly, useful. Paving stones for a road that actually goes somewhere. Or something.
All this to say, with this girl, I could be there. I didn’t just listen and understand. I knew. I knew what she felt and I swear, the words she said were mine not eight months ago. J and I were never engaged. But the relationship ended the same way, and for exactly the same reasons; a battle of will, of what we want vs. what we know we need. Because it ended, I found a new church. Because I found a new church, I met this girl. Because we’re both so much alike, we became friends, and when last night happened, I was there.
Talking to her made me late to a happy hour; cheers, happy birthday, must run was basically all the hostess got before I jetted off to a book group, where I got fantastically lost on straightforward streets, nearly went crippled in my too-tall-for-walking boots, and shattered a bottle of wine on the way.
Home again, we continue the conversation, the ex-engaged and I, and I wake up exhausted. I hate that.
The triple shot I ordered for my meeting with the lawyer this morning was, thus, essential.
The meeting confused me. Was it a date? Or was it not? Was it like one of those TV situations where the guy thinks he’s caught a live one when the girl gives him her card and says “call me,” but she’s really a psychiatrist and the “date” is an appointment? It could have gone that way; this guy is technically a source of mine. Maybe he isn’t interested in me at all, and just wants to make friends with the media. I have no idea.
We talked a bit about work, and what we each do; we talked about family, and how often we see them. What we think of DC, what we want to do with ourselves; what we think and what we like. It was good. He came here, out of his way; he set it up, and asked if I was free sometime this morning … but again, that could have been motivated by some larger self-interest. I walked him back to the metro on my way back here; he thanked me for “meeting with him.” Then he was gone, in a whoosh and a flash, and my heels clicked a lonely chorus back up the stairs.
Back here in reality, there appears to be a tremendous amount of work to do. It’s enough to make me wish I could act out and get asked to put my head down on the desk. As it is, I’d best get back to it; shelve the daydreams and thoughts and confusion for later. An odd sort of struggle to be sure.
