Three months

Zoinks, last week was one of those weeks. I went from 2 clients to 13 pretty much overnight, and added 8 students for my other job, and discovered that trying to keep track of 21 people other than yourself is do-able, but only if you don't stop to think about your personal life during the day. Or, really, any point during the week.

It's been over three months now; I don't know where I expected to be three months down the road, I just know that was the timeframe I gave myself initially to get over the worst part of a broken heart. Right after breaking up, I told myself I would wait at least three months before I made any major decisions, like to move to Kansas or quit my job or get another tattoo. I'm three months in and none of those things sounds remotely appealing, so I guess I'm glad I didn't make any rash decisions. I'm still settled, I still like my life, I'm still mostly content where I'm at. Even more so, in some ways, because losing the cross-town commute and double-life-mode has deepened my roots in the life I'm in. But doing "mostly well" possibly makes it harder when one of those days sneak in, when I still feel like my heart has been partially carved out with a dull grapefruit spoon. They're not frequent, but another one recently hit. And when they do, I feel like everyone must surely be tired of hearing about it by now, so I mostly keep it to myself, until I can't anymore, and I find a safe place/person and lose my shit for a half hour or so, then I pick myself up and move on for another month. All in all, I'm not too worried.

Dating has been interesting to throw in the mix.... mostly I've been meeting people that I didn't end up being interested in (was that Transformers tee-shirt supposed to impress me? It made an impression all right...), but then out of nowhere I realized I had... gasp... a crush on someone. It's been almost three years since that happened. I knew I was crushing, I suppose, when I realized I'd passed up a chance to go to an REI garage sale just to see him at a party... and if you know how much I love REI, and how much I love a good bargain, then you know I must have meant business. And I flirted, the perfect combination of shamelessly and tastefully, and it appears to have actually gotten me somewhere, and good god when did I learn how to do that? But it seems that while going on dates was easy (which, up until now, mostly involved having a drink with men I say goodbye to and never really think about again), liking someone involves a different kind of letting go. Because to even think about making real space for somebody new you have to start to let go of the missing, and the regrets, and the what-ifs, and all the other things you've been hanging onto to try to keep a piece - however scant and hollow - of the person who's gone.

In fact, I am coming to think that "letting go" is not so much being able to shake our hands clean of the thing that we're moving on from, but rather just loosening our grip - with every new conversation, every "yes" to an invitation, every "what the hell, why not drive to the next county on a Friday night to talk to someone who intrigues me?" - so that we put ourselves more directly in the path of something new coming along out of the blue, and bumping us, and perhaps a bit more of what we'd been holding onto goes flying out the window.