Dating someone is kinda like sitting at the coffee shop and grabbing the window seat as soon as the guy gets up. Swooping in as soon as his stuff leaves the table’s perimeters, before someone else could take it first.
I do this, and I apologize as I do. Normally, I make some stupid comment about the coffee shop being a War Zone and You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do To Survive In This Place. The reward? Well, Seeing Everything Outside from The Place You’re At without really Being Out There. Most of the time I exile there, I’m just trying to get out of my room. If you try this at La Colombe near Ritt, it’s more of a means of survival because of how many times you’ve been there before, between, and within your relationships that it’s kinda triggering to let yourself notice the room itself. I think everyone does a similar thing about that coffee shop because it’s in the center of most things and everyone has managed to have some sort of formative experience there, or I just like to pretend that I’m everyone. There’s two tables near the window on the shop’s entrance adjacent side-of-the-room, and the rest of the window spots are at the high-top bar with backless seats and you’ll only catch people whisking by with the flow of everything— the window is thin and lacks the leeway for much interpretation, as opposed to the floor-to-ceiling windows they have near the good tables— where it’s more convincing. That you could be out there with everyone else. But you aren’t.
I really only started sitting there so often after my first relationship ended, when I realized it might be the place people go. I’d sit and write and try to figure the whole thing out because it seemed like if I could just figure that out, then I might be able to figure myself out. And know what it was I had to do in order to be loved someday.
No matter how many times you realize there’s no answer, you have to keep realizing it. It’s been like 9 months, why is she still talking about this? I’ve been trying to make sense of everything that has happened to me in the months since October, sitting in the same chair at the same table as if it might trigger a sort of re-realization that I’ve been waiting for someone I allowed to be The Giver to give me the feeling that would make all the terrible parts worth it. He’s in charge. I said I Don’t Think It’s Fair To Blame Me but He Thinks It Is (and if he blames me, how do I stop blaming me? Psssssssstttttt it’s through talking it away… but, what if even that won’t dissolve what can’t be unheard?). He was here even before he was here, with his impending reliving of the first, and then really, a reliving the period of time when there wasn’t a first but the thing was in its purity (it’s like speaking backwards— explaining the cause before the root or if you could just visualize how it would sound if I said My Ex Emotionally Cheated On Me but in reverse: Em No Detaehc Yllanoitome Xe Ym…. ezilanoitar ot elbissopmi, and I feel irrational, probably because I make no sense either)… because obviously the Universe pulls us inside our patterns again and again until we are exhausted of them and beat. I feel like he’s been waiting to give me the thing he has To Give since I was born.
It’s similar to how I think my dad and I were born enemies. One time when I took a really wide-eyed edible I had this definitive feeling that he’d been chasing me through all my lives, there to play the role of a tormentor.
All of that to say, I know I haven’t been dating right, the good way— the one that doesn’t create that feeling in you. I know that it was probably on purpose so it doesn’t happen again. But in talking to Sophie and Jean in the red car last night, we concluded that you have to be with someone one day who’s normal in the ways that some other person wasn’t normal to you, so that you can finally know, then, that people are normal in ways you almost couldn’t believe.
I really needed to hear that, and collectively say that/come to that with them. Because sometimes you know something logically, but hearing it out loud from a person with skin and a face helps it to actually enter you.
It’s really easy for me to tell one of my friends that their ex being able to give all this honor and respect to someone else doesn’t mean anything about them and it’s not their fault, and I’m just glad that there’s humans around me who can try to pound it into my head even when I can’t really hear them (I wish we could know what we deserve). At The Dive, Sophie also said About What You Said In The Car— You Know That’s Not Your Fault Right? If anything, it at least reminds me there’s people I love who love me too. Omg, did I finally earn it? But I only existed…
Dating someone can sometimes end up as desperately trying a new coffee shop each day in attempt to see them or someone until it isn’t that anymore and you’re back to your normal life.
When I get really zonked off caffeine here, I imagine a crowd of people in my head jumping up and down, waving their arms above their heads, shouting out reasons for why certain things happened some certain way. I’m larger than them— they’re all small. Tiny, near-sighted people. I fill my mouth with coffee and spit it out all over them. They fall on their backs and swirl into one collective liquidation, vanishing quickly away down the drain with a gulp.
Something really weird is that I never once sat in a coffee shop with my first love, not La Colombe, not anywhere. Honestly, I didn’t have much to do at a coffee shop back then. And we spent a lot of time inside. I’m pretty sure that I was sitting in a coffee shop in New Orleans (recommended to me at 12 Steps Down by my more recent ex’s cool friend) at the same time that my ex was inside, holding his first love, who he was always in love with anyway. Your first love makes it hard to leave the house. But at some point, you realize there’s more life out there.
As I was getting up to leave today, someone did the same hovering movement to me with the same hunter-gather mentality. They laughed as I noticed them and said Thank You, nodding to the table, acknowledging that I was acknowledging them. I laughed, and said I Do The Same Thing.