blergraham lincoln

I've always heard that tensing up -- bracing for impact, so to speak -- can be the worst thing for your body in terms of sustaining injury. When you tighten your muscles and stiffen your frame because you know something's coming, you can cause yourself more harm. Take, for example, my friend Sarah, who recently walked away just about unscathed from being hit by a truck. The nurses told her she owed just about all of it to the fact that she never saw it coming. Her whole body was loose, limber. More able to react and move. More able to bounce back.

And since I love an obvious segue just about as much as I love a great extended metaphor, let's skip straight to the punch line: things with Mr. Risky Business ended on Monday night.

He came over to make dinner, and not five minutes after he arrived we were talking about my most recent blog post. And how he'd felt similar things, had similar concerns. And how it just didn't make sense to keep on as we were -- he said it wasn't fair to me, or to him, but mostly to me. That he couldn't give me what I wanted.

And it sucked. And the potential for extreme suckage was pretty high at that point, since I'd had an awful day and almost blacked out on the treadmill at the gym and was generally at anxiety level: TOTALLY HIGH STRUNG before he even got to my place that night. So I was trying to be cool. Or at least, human. I said, let's eat dinner. Let's just enjoy this evening. Let's not let it go to waste.

So we cook. And we screw up everything that we're cooking, to an absolutely comical extent, with the exception of the asparagus which are perfect except for the fact that they got cold waiting for the potatoes to reheat for the 85th time. And we eat, eventually, and we talk, and it's good. And at some point after dinner, I asked him what happens now -- do we not see each other again? How does he see this working?

And he says that we'll see each other around, but he's not going to pursue anything. Go out of his way to see me. And I admit to him that I have a hard time believing it, because it sounds a bit like that initial e-mail -- and we all know how those intentions panned out. And he admits that it's true, but that this time will be different. Because it has to be.

As he was leaving, I told him I knew what I was getting into when this whole thing started. And I did. I'd been bracing for impact. And maybe that explains why it hurt quite so much more than I'd anticipated. Like a punch in the gut, and I couldn't get myself out of bed on Tuesday morning. Being curled up in a ball just seemed like the only thing I had the mental faculties to do.

And clearly, that's passed. I'm up. I'm moving. I'm busy. I have an appetite, and for something besides ice cream. It's all going to be fine, it always is and I always knew it would be. But for now? It sucks. And adding to the general suck is that, really, I'm not entirely convinced it's over just yet. All those parts of my brain dedicated to romance and sex and other various whimseys, well, they've painted me all these pretty pictures where he changes his mind.


cheers,
elizabeth