Here’s the thing with new (non)-relationships: There are no promises, and you cannot, cannot let yourself plan around them. For three months I have let myself become prisoner to rules.
Being around him is almost comfortable. Our arms wrap around each other as if they have been doing so for years. We exist in almost comfortable silence while he makes us breakfast (and he makes damn good coffee) and when we catch each other’s eyes we exchange these quiet little smiles, that almost mean something, — but probably nothing. There is joy when I get him to laugh – he’ll want to keep me around, because I make him laugh, and he makes me laugh.
I am afraid of the unknown, yet I almost don’t really want to know, I’m almost not ready to know; because see, I already know. Because how can you have emotional intimacy when you aren’t really sure you like yourself? This is what I meant about the words on the tip of my tongue and the back of my throat, that I keep biting down and swallowing back. He has seen me erratic, just once, and it scared him. I almost want to open to him, but I don’t know if I can, and then, how can I blame him if he can’t open up to me, for his own reasons? And then, based on what I’ve divined, it’s almost besides the point.
It is that somehow, unexpectedly, I met one I almost actually liked, who I already kind of knew, and I’m more worried about how he sees me, and more clueless than ever. I almost want to know everything about him, and it’s too soon. I’m going to get attached, knowing barely anything more than that it has felt almost completely right in his arms since the first night he kissed me. When I say I have never felt this way about anyone, I mean it. I just don’t know what exactly it is I feel.
And in my mind, I keep replaying all the ways this is going to end, the way he is going to tell me that he’s sorry, he’s tried, but he just can’t be involved with anyone, or he’ll give me that line about how yeah, I’m great, but he just doesn’t feel that way about me, and I’ll be crushed, because there seemed to be potential, and then there will be one more potential gone.
I hate what I’m doing, where I check my email too much and I spend way too long composing a response. This game, of saying all the right things, keeping him interested, making him want more, and trying to be patient and be good with what is right now. Taking it slow, because he’s on the rebound. Wondering if I’m naïve to see any potential in this, to have any hope in this becoming more than what it is right now.
Opening up has always been almost too easy. For whatever walls I have built up in the past, reigning in the instinct to let someone in, with the knowledge that I have to hold back takes so much energy. And then I’m afraid that all this emotional energy will just blow up in my face and he’ll back away.
“I am a cynic. You are a romantic. And you are really romanticizing this.” HWSNBN said this, a sneer nearly four years ago that my heart still contracts on. I’m not sure why he had to say it, since he was the one making all the rules. But he said it, and it hurt, because I thought I was in love with him, and he made it so easy. His disgust for my romanticism – and hence for me – triggered a construction project of concrete around my heart.
Today, I compare relationships to bank balance sheets, and don’t think its that far off. I am afraid to believe in feeling almost anything anymore, both for fear I’ll feel something that isn’t returned and for terror that I just won’t feel anything at all.
