The Battle of Questioning, or Not Questioning, or Being So Tired of It All That You…
“He’s definitely playing the field,” my friend Kim says to me after meditation practice this morning. We are walking to lunch and she’s just stated that she noticed Keller and I hanging out more lately.
“I know, that’s clear to me now,” I say, deciding not to tell her about Shambhala Day way back in February, when I still had the storyline going about him and was pursuing something serious.
“And he’s like my husband: hard to pin down. Sort of all over the place,” she continues. She is, of course, being honest with me because she knows she can be. Our conversation is actually quite light despite the subject matter.
“But one-on-one it’s actually possible to get him to sit still. I enjoy his company,” and as soon as I say it I have to ask myself: Is it his company I enjoy, or just any company? “It’s a mix of both,” I say out loud without realizing it.
“Huh?” Kim is confused.
“Sometimes I don’t want anything to do with this level of things and other times it’s just a great fit. God, I don’t know, maybe I’m transitioning into the world of quick fixes. I’m fatigued. I’m suffering from emotional over exposure. That must be it.”
“Oh, but he’s not even sticking around here. He has plans to move back west in a few years,” Kim says. And this I already know, because Keller has told me himself, in the same conversation that he told me “the girl in Colorado” is no longer in the picture, but that eventually he would have to return to the west for the mountains.
“I’m not looking for long term,” I reply and I actually mean it. Winter exhausted my emotional stores. Forget falling in love. Forget long term. That will happen again someday but I don’t have the time for it now. What I do have time for, is the every-so-often sort of click-fall-into-place thing. There will be no “R word” here (relationship). In other words, casual, which is precisely the direction things with Keller are going thus far. Slowly, of course, though he wouldn’t even be able to put words to it if pressed to do so because he doesn’t think that way.
And as for me, I’m trying not to think that way either. No interior monologue. No overanalyzing. No games. No drawn out plans. Which of course goes completely against my nature so I have to wonder if I am knowingly tricking myself again, putting on the façade of aloofness like a thin lace veil over what may always be my truly bleeding heart.
