Woke up this morning feeling fine, but the Saturday commute left me rattled and even a little sore. I don’t want to take another does of the panic pill but I just might.
Woke up for some reason reflecting on the woman who most recently left me behind. Her reasons don’t even bear repeating. She wante out, and she wanted out with the upper hand. If she wants to believe she got that, she can believe that. Most of what we had together was based on fantasy. Most attempts at romance and love are wrapped and soaked and saturated in fantasy. I will never be taken for what I am because what I am is not enough, not good enough.
What I am left with today is the possibility that she, the first woman I dated and bedded in New York, will also be the last. I have no prospects whatsoever. If you want to talk dating apps I have not had a meaningful connection in 5 years. By “meaningful” I mean a sentence. A conversation. Something that did not involve moving the conversation to WhatsApp or Telegram, or learning how to buy Crypto. That is the landscape of dating apps now. I don’t know if the same is true for women but I have certainly heard and read about women getting scammed the way people try to scam me.
But that’s not even the substance of the situation. Men on dating apps face a continuous stream of rejection. When I say it’s been 5 years since a meaningful encounter occurred that even comes with a scammy twist. She had recently wired off her life savings to a Turkish syndicate claiming to be a U.S. Marine held hostage by ISIS in Afghanistan. All he needed was $100,000 to pay the ransom and they could be together forever. She fell for it, wired the money, and next thing you know she’s back on the apps looking to fleece whatever man she can to, as she shamelessly admitted, “make mysself whole.” SOmehow she got the impression I was wealthy. When I made it clear I was not that ended the connection. She basically walked out on me at the Oyster Bar Saloon.
I honestly do not know why I got back into it with the woman I did. I am neither opposed nor a favorite of second chances but somehow the span of 33 years made the notion of “rekindling” something seem too far-afield. There was a distinct and congenial sense of nostalgia, no question about that. We routiney referred back to the mutual friends and circumstances we shared in the early 1990s, as we carved out our individual lives inependent of each other. She spoke of ending our connection with the upper hand, and described me as kind of a grovelling, sniveling reject. She described supposed encounters I am certain never happened, while I deferred from recounting unflattering behaviors on her part that occured after our relationship ended. She just kept coming back, implying and suggesting that we spend time together again after making it abundantly clear that this should never happen again. She’s being the same way now, or at least she was being that for a couple of weeks. I think she has given up but I don’t know. I am not playing games with this.
It’s the future I think about now. My singleton future. My wasted future. I gave her very good sex, and I would be happy to do so again with someone else. But it doesn’t work like that. Compatibility takes time to develop. We were getting there. I loved when she woke up happy, and commenting on how good it was for me to keep “busy” in bed. She would smile, and at other times she would almost collapse, that feeling of being fucked filling every pore and core of her body. When will I have that again?
As I type these words a puzzlingly beautiful woman I don’t remember ever seeing here passed through the room and said hello to me. Who is she? Here she comes again. I am going to keep typing to impress her. To make her think I am something different from the rest. OK, she passed through the other hallway, giving me a glance as she returned to wherever the hell she returned to. I have to go anyway.
