27
June 2002
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I've been quite the dating machine since I've been in Atlanta. There was the guy with no manners, who made me split the check and walked in front of me; the boring mortgage broker; the neonatal nurse who took me out more than once but then dropped off the Earth. (He even took me out for ice cream. I mean, how do you take a girl out for ice cream and then not call her? Idiot.) There was the guy who claimed to be a lawyer but really wasn't, and no great loss there because he hand tiny, gross hands. (And since he wasn't really a lawyer he didn't really have the hundred dollar bills to wrap around said tiny fingers!) There was the Miami boy who went out of town on work for a month right after our date (who I'm still hoping to hear from). Then there was the other lawyer from way outside the perimeter who was just weird but still hurt my feelings when he said that there while he didn't feel there was a "romantic" connection he'd still like to get drinks and "hangout." (Which I'm pretty sure is the Southern way of saying: I don't want you to be my girlfriend, but I'd sure like to get drunk and sleep with you.) There was the guy who got his MBA over a year ago, but who's just been hanging out on his savings (ahem trust fund) and giving all Vanderbilt grads their deserved reputation. All we talked about were stupid fraternity parties and college music and Big Head Todd and the Monsters, who played in his fraternity house like 25 years ago. Move on. And while they've all had great qualities (well, I'm sure they all do anyway), they were all just missing that thing. You know the one I'm talking about. That thing that makes your stomach twirly, your lips dry and your palms tingle. That thing that makes you, no matter how much you hate it, roll over the sound of your first name connected to his last. That thing that shivers up from underneath your toes through your belly button to the roof of your mouth. And I just don't understand why I can't meet a guy whose fingers, when they brush my arm, feel like magic. But I meet nice guys. Cute guys. Funny guys. Tall guys. Smart guys. Rich guys. But not the guy. I haven't met the guy. Is it because I'm looking? Is it because I'm searching him out in almost the same aggressive manner that I'm searching out a job? Maybe. Probably. But how else am I supposed to go about it? I can't sit back and wait for him to come to me. Sure, sure, that's what the Indigo Girls say: love will come to you. But the last time I tried that it took years to find him, and then when I did, it was all complicated and the timing was wrong but we went ahead with it anyway, thinking we could still make it despite all the signs telling us not to go there. And of course the signs were right, weren't they? Signs don't lie. Or is it because in all the faces of these Atlanta guys I'm just looking at the face of that guy? Late at night when I hug my pillows all up around me, I scare myself into thinking I won't ever find anyone else. I won't find someone else who will love me. Does that really happen twice? Intellectually, I know that it does. Of course it does! I tell myself. Don't be stupid. Don't be a melodramatic teenage girl who listens to sad music all night long and scribbles her heart's waning desires in a little diary with a plastic lock. But my room is so dark and quiet. When I go to bed I hear only the hum of the air conditioning and the deep sighing, steady breath of Montego. There's no rustling beside me. There's no arm slung around me, no big hand resting on my hip. I feel the pillow that I keep pressed into my back and I hug the other tighter to my chest and try to remember what it feels like to have someone's hot breath on my neck, someone's feet tangled up in mine and someone's heart thrumping through me, all the way down. I trick myself into sweet dreams where I remember what it was like to love. And in the morning I toss the quilt off of me and shove the pillows aside, and I set out again, on the quest.
The notify mourns my unemployment. The forum is hoppin'.
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