What took four years to build took eight months, 150 boxes and two movers to break down. As I stood in my new apartment amidst the piles of boxes, bins and dismantled furniture, I was overwhelmed. After all the battle scars from a long, arduous break-up, the ongoing assassination of my character, replaying arguments in my head in an attempt to figure out what I could’ve done to make John still want me and now having to start over, I couldn’t help but contemplate what I had to offer. What did I have to show for the past four years? What now? What’s it all worth?
I needed to get out of the apartment and out of my head. I had been hiding out and mourning long enough. I needed a few things for my apartment so I met up with Warren at Target. Of course. We perused the Home aisles as he dexterously boosted my ego. I tossed a doormat into the cart.
“Just think,” Warren pointed out. “You’re going from being a doormat to buying a doormat. That, my friend, is growth.”
He was right…And clever.
Later that night, I decided to step back into a social setting and have a drink with my good friend Susan, who had also recently gone through a harsh break-up. We caught up, shared war stories, consoled each other and laughed off our obvious lack of judgment in choosing mates. Susan told me about going to John’s birthday party, to which I was invited but not wanting to be a deer in a lion’s den, politely declined. She informed me of a conversation she had with Danny, who had flown in for John’s birthday. As it turns out, John and he were now dating and Danny was planning on selling his house in North Carolina in order to move to Florida to be with John. Good luck with that.
Honestly, the news didn’t faze me. I actually felt relieved. Ever since Danny’s visit in January, I knew something was going on between the two of them. Whenever I broached my concerns with John, he would discount, belittle and make me feel foolish for even thinking such a thing. I’m not crazy. My powers of intuition were/are still very much intact.
Thinking back on the stories I heard about his exes and in some cases, hearing their version of the demise and now realizing what really caused our break-up, I realized John had a pattern. He seemed to fall hard and fast for someone and when it got too real or intimate, he would begin pulling away, line someone else up then force his partner to be the one to finally pull the plug, making himself out to be the victim. It’s not me. It’s you! Congratulations. You’re going to live a sad, miserable and lonely existence.
Meanwhile, I wondered if I was meandering in Rebound Territory. Over the course of four months, Warren had become not only a great, like-minded friend but also someone I could see a future with. Alas, he had made it clear that he could only offer a casual dating relationship. He said he was worried about repeating his self-identified pattern of “jumping” from one relationship to another. I respected the fact that he was up front and self-aware about his insecurities. It didn’t make me like him any less, however. What we have is quite atypical and indefinable. Most of the time, it seems more like ‘nothing’ than ‘something’ but all of the ‘nothing’ has meant more to me than so many ‘somethings.’
It made me wonder. Did I have a pattern of my own? I like patterns on textiles but not when it comes to relationships. Did his appeal lie in the notion that he was emotionally unavailable? Do I somehow have a masochistic streak that compels me to chase men who have all but spelled out that they don’t want a relationship?
I acknowledged my concerns but then told myself it’s way too soon to be overanalyzing or trying to put a label on it. All I knew was that Warren made me feel the butterflies again. Hearing his voice, looking into his warm, munificent brown eyes, his sideways smirk made my breath catch in my chest…Hell, even just getting a text from him brightened my day. It was then I knew that I had weathered the storm. My heart was open to love and that’s the best thing I had to offer.
Erik Fact: Some people are settling down, some people are just settling and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies.
