I forgot to laugh when he said I was perceptive.
Perceptive girls don’t fall in love with boys who are unavailable.
Who am I kidding? Of course we do.
We wait, that is also a thing we do, when we find someone who is worth it. I thought if I waited he would know he could trust me. In retrospect, the smarter thing would have been more opening my mouth, more explaining and less hiding and trying to seize the right moment, any moment would have been good. Less reading the signs and more asking direct questions and actually listening to the answers.
Hindsight, you fucking cunt.
I had a dream, about Him. We were standing on the edge of Niagara Falls at night watching the lights, both remarking on how awful it was that they would make a mockery of something so beautiful with a light show. He was holding me close, we were looking down and my hat flew away. He looked at me and said “you have to let it go”, I feebly replied that it was my favorite hat but I didn’t put up a fight, I knew it was gone and he was right. There was nothing better than standing there with him.
I have lots of hats, but there is one that is my favorite. Makes me feel pretty when I don’t, compensates for my bad hair days, frames my face just so, keeps me warm and brings me comfort. There is a metaphor here. I let that hat go.
Then there was the owl. I was driving home the day before fetching Him from the airport and I had the weirdest thought, I have a thousand million thoughts a day, some louder than others. It’s easy to lose them in the crowd. Except when, right at that very moment this really loud thought comes roaring over all the others, an owl flies into your car window. The thought was this “you are going to tell him you love him and then you are going to have to kick him out of your house, it is the only way this will work.” Two days later, that exact thing happened, exactly the way I had watched it happen in my head.
The owl came back last night. The dogs took themselves a walk to the neighbors who were watching the owl fly back and forth across their yard. The mantra playing in my head at that moment? “If you have to choose between me and her. Pick her.”
Once upon a time I was the ‘her’. The “him” picked me, and it ended badly, we all behaved badly. I have a map to that place. It’s the swamp of sadness. I watched another woman disrespect the relationship I was in, chase ‘my’ man until it worked for her, she got what she wanted in the end. Except she still doesn’t have it and she knows it. I don’t want to live that way.
I am not her.
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