If I Can Make it There…

“I’ll make it anywhere…”

It’s a dumb phrase, if you think about it. “Making it” in New York isn’t that big of a deal. Now, if you can make it in Somalia or the Sudan, color me impressed.

Anyhoo…I’m back from my four day weekend in New York and I’m happy to report that all went well. Renee and I got along wonderfully! We even had to share a bed (and I HATE sharing beds with people I’m not related to), and it was fine! She has solidified her spot as a viable traveling companion 😁.

I’ll spare you the block-by-block narrative, but we did hit some interesting spots. Thursday and Friday we met with some of my social media friends. Saturday we had dinner and drinks with my baby brother and two of my cousins.

It was strange to be the only one who wasn’t drinking…Renee didn’t imbibe too much and kept an even keel, but it was still obvious that she had a few. It didn’t BOTHER me that everyone else was indulging, to be honest. What DID bother me was asking bartenders for something non-alcoholic and non-carbonated (doctors orders).

Water with lemon gets old pretty fast, so yeah…I drank more juice this weekend than I’ve drank in my entire life.

Bartenders are really judgmental. I don’t think I ever noticed (or cared) if one of my patrons chose not to drink alcohol. I guess I just assumed they were the designated driver of the group. But the guys in New York looked at me as if I had three heads and a Mormon bible under my shirt. Every time I ordered a juice, I wanted to tell them to “Let go and let God”, alà Alcoholics Anonymous.

Dicks.

The other thing I found troubling (or perhaps annoying) is that as I watched at my friends and family get progressively loopier, I wondered if that’s what I look like when I’m drinking. It occurs to me that I haven’t had alcohol since New Year’s Eve…that’s almost three whole months. I don’t miss it, per se. I think I miss the routine of it. The normalcy.

Right now I feel abnormal, but I’m a minority with a big rack so that’s nothing new.

Moving on…THAT GUY and I had a chat today about spooning. We both LOVED to spoon, especially naked. And although we’re officially “just friends” now, he expressed an interest in spooning just one more time.

Uh. No.

I explained that I CAN’T lay down next to him skin-on-skin, without wanting more. I know that we are incapable of leaving things at “just cuddling”…we’ve proven this in the past. HE seems to believe that we can, but I know it’s just not true. All of the feelings will resurface and we’ll fall back into old patterns.

See, he’s my Achilles heel. I spent seven years taking PRIDE in my role as His Girl. I made sure I knew what his desires were and I loved to fulfill every one of them. It made me happy. But I CAN’T fulfill this request because I know it’ll break my heart when it’s over and we’re right back where we are now. This is a matter of self-preservation.

I find myself having to lay down some boundaries and when it came to THAT GUY, boundaries didn’t exist. But now they have to.

I tried to ignore the fact that even though my heart might break when he gets dressed and leaves, HIS heart won’t.

The thought of laying next to me, naked and cozy and then returning to “just friends” didn’t seem to faze him. Like it wouldn’t be a big deal…easy peasy.

Maybe that’s because he’ll have gotten what he wanted and that’s all he needs. Maybe it’s because he’s better at compartmentalizing than I am (and I’m really good at it. Like- REALLY good). I can put everything in its own box and take it out only when I need it…except when it comes to him.

I want to believe that he won’t push the issue now that he knows how much it would hurt me. He can’t be THAT selfish. He’s just not that kind of man- this much, I know is true.

Weeks ago when I told him that I needed to change our dynamic, we had just been intimate and were having dinner at a bar. It might not sound horrible, but turn the tables…If a man had sex with a woman and ended the relationship immediately afterward, she’d have hung him from the rafters by his balls and used his dick as a piñata.

And the whole fucking world would applaud her.

It just so happened that he didn’t seem to mind the order of events, which is good. He recently mentioned that he wished he had known it was going to be our “last time” because then he would have savored it. Meanwhile, I had savored every minute I had with him for the last seven years because I never knew when it could end.

See the difference?

The real question in my mind is: What would he have done differently had he known it would be last time we would be intinate?

I think men are just hardwired to be apathetic when it comes to sex. I’m just not sure that sex has to “mean something” where they are concerned. Women tend to make mountains out of molehills when it comes to shit like sex, love and loading the dishwasher…we look for some sort of significance in every action men take, don’t take, forget to take and refuse to take.

I’m guilty of being that woman…THAT GUY reminded me of it every chance he got. “You’re looking for things that aren’t there,” he’d tell me.

I ask myself questions that I’ll never get the answer to. I ponder and ruminate and drive myself insane with the “what if’s” and “why nots” and “how comes”. I analyze and speculate and assume.

Face it: Dating me is like traversing a mine field.

But I suppose that if you can make it through my mine field…you can make it anywhere.

Like Somalia, for instance.