I thought I was done. I thought I was all over it. I haven’t thought about it/him or anything else to do with it/him in weeks. Months even. I even said his name in passing last week and didn’t think more than anything normal about it. And then it happened. Facebook killed my mojo. Photos of him appeared randomly in my timeline and there I was half way between the kitchen and the lounge room, mid dunk with a teabag, and his face flashes across my iPhone. We are not friends on facebook and as far as I know, he doesn’t even have a facebook account, but there he was irrespective of any thought for my well being.
As I flicked through I realised I was looking at photos of my holiday. The same photos I took, but this time from a little bit to the left. A friend had uploaded her holiday photos four months late. We met on the same tour and I liked her. So I kept her. She had a friend, I Iiked him, so I kept him too. We met another one. I liked him too. I didn’t keep him. I liked him a little bit differently than the other two and in the typical plot development of my love life, I ignored him, thought bad thoughts about myself and wondered what the hell I could possibly offer that man. Turns out he was mildly hurt by my assumptions and spent a week trying to force me to change my opinion. In hindsight it is unfortunate that he was more hurt by my assumption of his arrogance rather than my lack of confidence to think I wasn’t good enough, but we are all a little one eyed when it comes to how we think we are seen. And in this case we struggled so much to get out of our own ways we had absolutely no luck getting in each other’s.
The holiday had ended yet my crush carried its way across the Pacific Ocean and came home with me. With a little bit of time, a little bit of talking, a little bit of writing and a lot of wine, I managed to chock it up as experience and promised myself not to be too judgemental in future. It’s the future. He hasn’t exactly disappeared and I don’t think I’ve gotten that much better at not being judgemental. I thought I had. I thought I’d gotten a little bit more confident so that I wouldn’t dismiss a man/human based merely on the fact that my initial reactions were either negative or I considered I had nothing to offer them but the lack of man action that has crossed my front door lately would attest that that is not the case.
I was hoping when I got home that the brassy arsed woman with a little bit more gumption when it came to men would come home across the Pacific as well. While I can still feel parts of her, I can’t help but think she is sucking down a corona and sunning herself on a Caribbean beach somewhere in Mexico. I did like her. She was funny at appropriate moments and some of the time she knew what to say to a man. Not often, but often enough to know that the smile she got back was a little bit naughtier than the one before. The same could be said realistically of all of my relationships. The ones with men, women, sexual and friendships. I judge quickly and love just as fast. It seems that if you can make it past the first five minutes with me without me thinking you are a tool, then I will like you. And like you a lot.
A friend of mine, isn’t it always the way, it’s always a friend, said that my biggest strength is also my biggest weakness. My connections with other humans are different for me than they are for other people. At first I was a little shocked and concerned that the statement was an insult. Was that supposed to mean that I was over protective, clingy and a little bit desperate for friends and human connections? While that was my overactive self imagination, what he really meant was that when I meet people I like, my investment is large. And while it’s apparently a lovely quality to have, I also can’t expect people to invest the same amount back. The nature of the beast he says. Not everyone can afford to invest in others so deeply.
While I contemplated what it felt like to be spoken of like a property investment, I had to admit that he was right. We sometimes like people more than they like us. And there it is. I am fourteen again and the depths of unrequited love run deep. While that’s not exactly what he meant, the suggestion was not to be disappointed when people who you’ve invested in, don’t invest the same amount back.
Being single means that we develop friendships and rely on them in ways different to our couple friends. We rely on our friends to be excited when we tell them something for the first time, to support us when things go badly and to talk to us while we fold our washing on a Tuesday night. You see single people don’t have that one person they can just tell random shit too. We get to a certain age when our mum’s no longer care about random shit and sometimes we just need someone around who can watch us fold a pair of socks. So we make friends. Some single people rely on one bestie, others of us have a few. I, on the other hand, like to have ten besties that I can rely on. I love them all and in them I invest. My time, my love and facebook status updates. Some of them have been around for a long time watching me fold socks, others only in the last few months but the point still remains, I surround myself with people I have a connection with and inconveniently I want them all to come home with me. From across the Pacific, next door and the suburb two down from me, I am a human connection whore.
This whoring does leave me somewhat exhausted sometimes. The face of an ex-crush across the screen of my phone allowed a whole rush of emotions, feelings and memories to come flooding to the surface that almost felt real. It took a little bit of emotional energy to shove him back down into that area at the back of my brain that is supposed to react with, ‘yeah, good memory,’ instead of ‘God, I like him heaps and heaps.’ I am learning and I am getting better at recognising what is memory and what is actually current feelings or emotions. I am learning not to mourn the absence of a sock watcher and rather to celebrate the fact that I shared my sock folding with them in the first place. Pretty soon I may even be able to fold my socks all by myself. Now that’s development.
life in big frilly knickers 