it is probably too soon.
no, it is definitely too soon for this - smiling, flirting, laughing with a stranger. too soon for first dates, too soon for getting to know another person, too soon for doing this strange dance all over again; it’s too soon and it makes me tired and it just makes me miss you more than the missing i do all day and all night to begin with.
for the first time, i came home from a date and felt nothing. not giddyness, but not dislike or disappointment either. nothing. an emotional flatline. i begin to wonder if i have become incapable of loving anyone.
we had a good time, we laughed and talked and i could see him liking me more and more as time went on, and when he said how great of a time he had, i enthusiastically replied, “me too!”
so when he asked me out to dinner i said yes. and then it begins again.
but this time as he walks me home, i already know what’s coming. and yet i still feel nothing, no butterflies but no dread, just dull emptiness where some sort of feeling should be. and when he kisses me i still feel nothing, but afterwards i hug him very tightly for reasons i can’t explain, and suddenly i am picturing you standing here, i’m picturing us kissing here a hundred times, and feeling nothing very suddenly turns into feeling something.
it seems so wrong somehow, to know that he walked away so happy, thinking man, ain’t life grand, still buzzing after our kiss, and i am upstairs in my bedroom, crying. first kisses aren’t supposed to make you cry and wish for someone else; they’re not supposed to make you feel miserable. but it did, and i still do. they’re supposed to, i think, make you feel relieved that you’ve finally been able to move on in some way, to at least consider someone else, but instead i think i have taken many steps backward, back to the place where i still can’t imagine how i could ever want anyone else but you.
