"Clueless"

Ok here is a bit of context for my story today. This is an email I sent someone yesterday afternoon, regarding my friend J, who I have been spending a lot of time with in the last few weeks, who sought me out aggressively after being absent from my life for almost 10 years, who sent multiple emails and looked me up in the phonebook and told me what a great voice I had and how she couldn't wait to see me again, who cried openly with me during sad movies, laughed hard at my jokes and asked questions about my life and was thoughtful and kind and appreciative of my being a gentleman, but remained frustratingly obscure and conflicted about whether I was being courted or just passing the time.

I had asked my friend J out on Sunday, asked if she wanted to eat dinner with me on Tuesday, and she accepted. So, great. But come Monday morning she calls me and says "I had no idea it was Valentine's Day!" She then gives me a big spiel about the service industry, and how no waiter wants to work on Valentine's, and how "every restaurant will be super crowded," how we'll not get seated on time, etc etc. She made it sound like a huge drag. So we dropped the plan. Now, EVEN THOUGH we still have plans to "do something" tonight, I really do NOT want to entertain company at my pad, cos it is wrecked, and also cos [my roommate] is there and I really don't feel like being eavesdropped upon. So I guess we'll hit the pub but I ain't paying another $72 tab that's for damn sure. I was just bummed out that instead of being flattered that a guy asked her out on Valentine's, she seemed to take an overly practical approach and did not seem to really notice the good stuff, only what a drag it would be. I want some recognition that I tried to make someone happy. I know she isn't trying to be insensitive or be snotty about how "it isn't good enough." But I think maybe fairly soon I'll need to ask the question, "Hey, I like you, but ... are we going anywhere with this?" Because I don't feel any kind of "date vibe" off this girl, but for the life of me I can't sort out why she'd go to such troubles to see me so often!!! She lives an hour away but wants to have dinner in the middle of the week? WHY? If she wants to hide from life by working overtime at [corporate coffee chain] and going to Church ... Why spend time with ME? I am not a "safe friend." I am a single guy who looks to change. So why hang out with me if you don't "like" me? (Hell, maybe she just isn't 'romantic.' This could be the case.) I am just all tied in knots and that gets me really anxious and depressed. I am also very disappointed in myself that I am reacting so strongly to things involving a girl. Its very stereotypical of me and I really do not like that about myself, as I feel it makes me look weak. This is a HUGE factor in why I have been so single for so long. I just fall to pieces and I don't want to be that kind of guy for a girl. I need someone who can openly appreciate that I am simply human with a few needs, needs such as "Maybe needs to be recognized as a suitor a little more explicitly." Because I can't live like this. I can't devote tons of time to someone if they "just want to be friends." I can handle being friends; I just don't spend too much time with the ones I have now, you know? I have things I need to do, just regular "Lee stuff," and I don't want to miss out on those things if I have simply been "wishful thinking" about a woman who is bored and wants some male attention. You want to know a secret? When I feel good about this gal, I get all sorts of crazy ideas in my head. Ideas like, "How important are action figures to me?" or "Maybe its time to buy a house instead of rent" or "I might look better to a woman if I got my teeth cleaned" or "how much does a KIA car cost cos its not fair for a woman to drive me around?" You know --- grown up stuff. Settle down stuff. Change my life for the better stuff. And then I get cancelled on ... on Valentine's Day. Argh. Maybe it *is* just a resistance on her part to "a stupid over-commodified holiday." Fine, I can get behind that. I am more sentimental than that, but I can still accept that attitude. No problem. Its just that ... Well, It would have been nice for her to say, "But it was nice to be asked out anyway." (And then I chastize myself for expecting independent human beings to conform to my desires. Ha!)

Well, after last night at the pub I guess I got my answer. Still feeling a bit numbed, like after you get punched, or hit by a car, and you are afraid to move lest you realize you are broken somehow. But at least the event itself has passed, and there is a perverse relief in at last knowing where you stand, even if its not standing at all, but lying in the road, uncertain, throttled, waiting to feel.

A few beers loosened her tongue and a few direct questions and honest statements of my own feelings got me where I was headed all along, and that's nowheresville, but hey, they know me here. Apparently I am "really good company" and while I accept this about myself as true, I also must accept that to continue to spend time around J is to continue to deny my own needs and desires. And it is very hard to say this to a friend when she smiles as big and flattered as she can when you tell her that all you want is to make her feel special and that enduring a lot of bullshit on Valentine's was a small way of demonstrating that she was indeed dear to me and more special than anyone else.

So I feel at the least that I gave it my best shot, and was rather articulate about how I felt, and that a great reflief to me as well, because I couldn't just carry that around with me. But it looks like the shelter of a career in a coffee shop and a life devoted to [a fictional metaphor] win out over what I can offer, which sounds more self-pitying than I would prefer, as one cannot force love or attraction, and I don't want anyone to compromise for me, either. But really I knew it was over when J said "I know plenty of people who have led happy and productive lives and never wanted for a mate," and while I knew she was referring to herself, and her resignation that she would never be able to devote herself to a real relationship, I felt also she was somehow trying to reassure me that a Solo Career wasn't a Bad Thing.

Maybe I'll be able to count my blessings. Maybe I'll be able to say "How long, Lee, would you have put up with a life guided by the Church, a willfull self-deception?" Maybe I'll say "How long, Lee, would you have lasted until you realized you really did not respect the corporation J has attached herself to, and how she ignores the exploitation and lack of concern it has for her?" How long would it have taken me to grow weary of her repressed pining over a man who broke her heart, twice?

But maybe I'll torture myself with thoughts that I would have grown to respect and understand these things that are alien to my life. Maybe I'll dig needles into my skin remembering that I was willing to compromise my lifestyle in favor of a richer partnership filled with challenges, not obstacles? Or perhaps I will reach a good place where I am OK with making compromises, because it is part of co-existence, and I'll use this ability to my advantage in the future? Who can say.

But in finality, in a purging, perverse, ironic and unsettling note of closure, I will relay this tidbit: when we were leaving the pub, the bartender says, hey, how about a mint, and he offers a jar of those little Valentine's heart-shaped mints, and I say, that's stupid, he thinks we are a happy couple leaving for the evening, because we have smiles on our faces and laughter in our throats, but these are from the euphoria of honest exchange and truth, not romance, but I take the damned mint anyway, and he says, Read it! Read it to us! So I do, and I laugh at the odds of getting the message, and I laugh at what fate put that mint in my hands, on that day, at that time, and I show it to him, and he looks puzzled, as if he didn't know mints like that existed, but I am laughing anyway so he smiles with me, and then J says, "What does it say," and I mutter something about truth, and smile, and I show her, and her heart won't let her be less honest in her reaction, and she just looks at it a little blankly, and sees the truth around her, sees the "meaning" and the "guiding hands" she is so fond of seeking now, and reads the words printed clearly and placed in my care, printed on happy pink candy:

"Clue Less."

I bit into it, ate it. And when J dropped me off, I said, smiling, "See you soon," and she said, "Definately," and we both felt like liars for the first time, and when I was going to sleep, I was thinking of her, and saw her on a boat, a little boat, like a rowboat, and she was standing up in it alone, and had a hand raised in greeting, or farewell, and there was a fog in the air that seemed light, but as she drifted away, waving, the fog was thicker than it seemed, and she just faded into it.