Charming, but single

I am out of words.

For all of the good advice and caring I’ve received this week, I am out of words.

For all of the moody music I’ve listened to, for the pint of ice cream I ate, for the mindless TV I’ve watched, I’m out of words.

I am not depressed or terribly sad or crying anymore. I’m not bitter or rage-filled. I am out of words.

So I’m sitting, curled up alone in this bed without my words to comfort me, thinking about myself, thanking the heavens for my kind friends.

Grand realizations and cathartic outbursts deserve a moment or two to sink in. So I am marinating in my past choices, pausing in this slight melancholy and planning my next step.

I was relaying a conversation I had with a certain man to a friend. He’d said he’d come over and didn’t and so I sent him a snippy text the next morning because I am actually 12 years old and he wrote back later to say he was sorry.

“And then I said, ‘Look, I’m going to stop worrying about this, I’m not your girlfriend. This is not supposed to be stressful for me,’ which I thought was pretty reasonable,” I told my friend. “But remember this was on instant messenger.”

“Uh-huh,” said my friend.

“So he writes back, ‘I understand’,” I said. “And so I write back, ‘I just want to have fun.’”

“Right.”

“And he writes back, ‘I know.’”

“Okay …”

“And I say, ‘So, if you’re not up for that, let me know.’”

“And?”

“He said, ‘Oh I am,’” I said. “And then whole thing drove me crazy because I was so incredibly pissed about him just not calling me to say he wasn’t coming and here I am trying to have a conversation about this and all he can muster is one or two word answers? But then I was thinking that he WAS on his Treo, so maybe that’s all he could type.”

“Wait, excuse me?” My friend had been skeptically listening to me vent, but her ears perked up at this.

“Well, you know, they have small keyboards.”

“Smaller than the keyboard on your Blackberry, which you seem to have no problems typing at length on?” she asked.

“Well, you know, not everyone can type …”

“Do Treos have full keyboards?”

“Yes.”

“Does he have the most GINORMOUS hands ever? Are his fingers so big that he can’t wiggle them? Are his hands FREAKISHLY large?” My friend asked, clearly annoyed.

“Well, not really.”

“SO, you’re telling me that you’re now making excuses for a guy for sending crap one and two word responses on his phone, which doesn’t even have one of those lame keyboards with two letters to a key?”

“Well, when you say it like that,” I said. “What was I supposed to say?”

“APOLOGY NOT ACCEPTED. WTF!” And to punctuate she airkeyboarded on her Blackberry and slammed it down on the table.

A continuation of this post.

Plans are fun to make. But when you get the news that the time is quickly nearing and plans will come to fruition, I don’t think that your first reaction should be your stomach rumbling. Never a good sign.

So I’m going the honesty route with some confidants to gauge their reactions and hopefully snap myself back into reality.

“I’m thinking of revisiting a person from my past,” I told Best Friend Ever.

“Why would you do that when he wasn’t good enough the first time around?” she asked.

“Because, it’ll be fun. Just casual.”

“This is a truly bad idea,” she said.

“No, it isn’t. No feelings. Just a fun way to pass the time.”

“This is a trend with you.”

“A trend?”

“You say you’re never going to get hurt and you say you’re not going care and you do get hurt because you do care.”

I told her that I didn’t think it was necessarily a trend and she reiterated that it was a truly terrible idea to revisit the past, if only for a fleeting moment of enjoyment. And I began to list all of the positives in a kind of whiny voice – why wasn’t she giving me permission to make this mistake? Friends are so frustrating sometimes, I was thinking.

She interrupted my incoherent rambling and said, “Aren’t there any nice guys out there that you haven’t dated before?”

“No, I am done. I am tired of propping my chest up in uncomfortable bras, I’m tired of wearing blush and worrying about my hair and smiling when I’d rather scream and having terrible fake conversations with men because I can’t find the one that I actually want to talk to because it isn’t fun out there. It is hard. And people are MEAN. And right now I’m too busy and too stressed out to get out there and find a new, worthy guy, so I’m going to hang out with an old one in hopes that this motivates me to put myself out there again.”

“Well, that sounds like a truly terrible idea,” she said.

I missed my three year blogiversary, which was last month on January 19. Damn, has it really been that long?

Three years and here’s all I have to show for it — ridiculously well-documented proof of my failed attempts at dating and my single girl woes, a shameful case of writer’s block and, even worse, a feeling that my silly hobby might mean more to me than I care to admit.

481 posts. 7494 comments. 493,187 visits (or views?) just since I launched over here at WordPress last year.

With all of that writing and all of that free advice, you’d think I would have learned something by now, right?

I started the year worrying about how my younger brother was getting married before I did. Which is pretty funny because that’s the same way I’ve been feeling now, a year later, ever since my young cousins suggested over Sunday dinner I go out with their 30-year-old reading teacher, who is actually 55 and married with five kids.

That tells you something about how kids view the world and the adults who inhabit it.

And when I asked why, they said “Because [Your Brother] is going to beat you and if you don’t hurry up, so is [Your Sister].”

They say the darndest things.

So, I realized that I never blogged about having my tarot cards read on New Year’s Eve, out in a famous Square of a city I love. I remembered this evening when I was rooting through my far-too-full Kathy Van Zeeland purse and pulled out a clear glass stone with a white pattern inside of it – the Tarot Card Lady gave it to me to remember my reading. I went with my girlfriends for a party and we decided to mosey on down to the Square to hang out and in the process stumbled upon the Tarot Card Lady.

Now, before people start leaving indignant comments about tarot card readings being complete bull, I will preface the retelling by saying that I did this after loads of peer pressure and with a healthy dose of skepticism. I was the last of the four of us to have a reading, mostly because my curiosity was piqued by my friends’ readings. I’ve been with friends before who had readings in this same Square – I was never willing to part with a few dollars for what I viewed as a glorified guess based on nonverbal cues.

The Tarot Card Lady sat at a small cloth covered table with two folding chairs-in-a-bag. She spread piles of well-worn tarot cards across the table and had me pick from stacks, laying them atop each other in a pattern, asking me questions along the way.

Of course I was most interested in my love life (or lack thereof). This was entirely to be expected. I was with a group of single women (one has a long-term boyfriend, but is unmarried).

Had I written this sooner, I might remember everything that she said. I only remember the high points, and I will give her that many of her comments were spot on. And I can only hope that her predictions ring true.

I do remember the first card she pulled because she said, right off the bat, that I was very smart. I smiled and nodded. She continued that I was very strong, but I was also extremely emotional and closed off.

I figured she was three for three on that one.

She said that my financial situation has improved (it has) and would continue to do so in the coming year. She pulled one card and said I’d built up a Wall to keep people out; that I’ve been hurt in the past and I don’t want to let men in because of this. (Pretty typical fare for a single 28-year-old, no?)

My skepticism permeated the reading. She kept returning to this Wall I’ve built up to protect myself from being emotionally harmed and said I’d need to figure out how to bring down that Wall in order to find happiness.

She said I’ll be a good mother and I, feeling a wee bit exposed having all of my girlfriends and hundreds of people milling around within earshot as she described my shut-in personality, asked cautiously, “So, I will find someone and have a family?”

The Tarot Card Lady looked me straight on in the eye, crooked her eyebrow and said, “Yes, have you not been paying attention?”

“Well, I know, it is just that everyone around me seems to be getting married. And I’m always a bridesmaid, never a bride,” I joked. Self deprecation is a familiar friend and my only life-long companion.

“Stop. Stop right there.”

“What?”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “If you keep saying that it will come true.” She continued that each time I said negative things I was building my Wall, which I needed to dismantle brick-by-painful-brick.

“You will find love. And you will have a good marriage.” she said.

And, yes this really happened, as she laid out the second deck of cards and talked about my love life, a newly married bride and groom entered the Square, walked past us with their photographer and stopped to pose for a portrait. The bride’s roses were bright crimson red – so bright I can see the exact hue in my mind right now.

“Do you see that?” she asked, excitedly motioning to the couple. “That is a very good sign. A very good sign indeed.”

I will find a man to love, she said. But it will not be easy. Because of the Wall I’ve surrounded myself with and because I compare every man to the one who hurt me and immediately find fault. Because I am scared.

And he’s scared too, she said. We will meet, I will know him immediately as my soulmate, but there will be much for us to overcome, as she said he will be emotional too. We will both have to work through our brick Walls together, and it will be hard.

“But, you are lucky,” she said. “Because you will find your soulmate and you will be together forever.”

As she finished I handed her some money and she picked a smooth stone from the table, where she’d laid out stones on many of the cards. She pressed the clear piece of glass in my hand and said it represented true love, beautiful and pure.

I dropped the stone in my purse and left her table with a smile.

Perhaps she is full of it. Maybe she read my cues and told me what I wanted to hear. Of course she picked up on my skepticism and could have judged me as closed off. Regardless, I left with a bit of hope for the future, a foolishly renewed faith in soulmates and silly ideas filling my head.

Later, I told my Mom about the tarot card reading, assuming her religious ways and conservative nature would make her mortified that I’d participated in such a thing.

She just smiled and asked, “Did she say WHEN you’d be meeting this soulmate of yours?”