Feeling: different
Listening to: Sarah Bettens - All of This Past
Reading/Watching: Vocal pedagogy text

I used to think I was cold-hearted.

Not in the "trampling-homeless-babies-into-the-mud-on-my-way-to-McDonald's " kind of way, but in the "it takes a lot to really grip the middle of my heart and flip me inside out" kind of way. I mean, I love people. I'm crazy about people, and appreciate all the good things about them, but I'm also one of those people who has never truly gotten lost in my feelings for a person. There is always the detachment, the feeling of "If this happened, it would only be temporary. Enjoy it now, because someday it will end."

I have two friends who are in the giddy stage of falling right now. Bri and Lynne both tell endless stories of "what he said next" and have that glow in their eyes that says wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And they're both beginning to say that dangerous word "always," both incredulous and lucky and unable to talk of anything else.

Perhaps I'm remembering crooked, but I honestly can't remember a time I was that. I've been happy, I've been singing and surprised and content, but the back of my heart was waiting for the brake lights. Cerebrally, I knew the book had a last page. It was just a matter of getting to it, and wondering, how long would it be before the things that prevented him from being perfect became too much for me to overlook? How long, before it wasn't enough having someone to hold, where sleeping dreamlessly was preferable to the anxious nightmares?

There was always an expiration date. I always felt it. Some part of me knew it was target practice, and not the real battle.

And I was afraid. Afraid that it would always be practice, always be the warm-up and the almost. There has never been a guy that I met and it was the crazy amazing wow giddy feeling. Never been someone that I couldn't get my fill of. Never a guy that I couldn't say goodbye to, that I didn't eventually want to drop off so I could be alone for a while.

Perhaps I'm misguided as to how it works. Perhaps that's not required. But part of me feels that it should be. There should be a wow. And right now, no one has ever elicited a wow. I begin to wonder if anyone ever will, whether I'm just not built that way, whether my heart is too disconnected, like I'm using up my wow quotient in dozens of truly wonderful friendships so that there's none left over for a solitary whammy.

...I started this entry saying I used to think I was cold-hearted. I suppose sometimes I still do think it. Sometimes I think the back corner of my heart will always be on tiptoes, waiting for the bottom to drop out. And then part of me realizes that I'll probably spend a great deal of time anxious, counting down to the ending, before I realize that years have passed and there isn't an ending, and while I wasn't looking, suddenly there's this person I can't live without. Like a long crescendo. The whisper becomes deafening while I'm not listening.

I never dive into a person. Not with anyone, any time. I sink, slowly. I've just always bounced off the bottom before, once my feet hit resistance. I am not cold-hearted for knowing there will be a bottom (defensive, perhaps, but a modicum of self-preservation would be nice). And I will not be cold-hearted the day I realize there is no expiration date.

He's just taking his sweet time arriving. Or I'm taking my time realizing he's arrived. Or something.

(Sorry for the rambles, it's just that last night an ex-boyfriend pulled me to him, mostly drunk, and mused that he really wanted to kiss me, and shouldn't have let me go. Made me realize that it's not just that I want anyone. I want something surprising.)

If I'm starting this year over, that includes the Summer of Solitude. Baptized anew into the Spring of Solitude. This time without midseason madness.

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