Good weekend. Ended the work week closing my first deal. My manager’s trying to go back into the records to see if I beat his record of fastest systems sale since date hired. He was the one who set it almost ten years ago. It takes most people three months at least to get their first deal. I got mine one month and three days in. This means so much to me. My dad heard and sent me an email saying that he’s proud of me for setting such a good example of work ethic. An equally awesome comment was from a girl in marketing who said that the office has been a lot more fun since I showed up.
End of the day, we tried to organize a team-building flash mob. As soon as the clock struck 5:30 to signal the end of the workday, we were gonna blast Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy. Everyone was supposed to come out of their cubicles as soon as they heard the music and we would form a dance parade by the president’s office, which looks out onto the sales bullpen through a large picture window. I told everyone it was an exercise in team bonding and solidarity, and just a funny way to end the week. So we got every sales team to agree, and marketing and purchasing as well. The clock strikes time and the music comes on. We’d asked T, the guy who MC’s our Christmas party every year to lead. So everyone’s gathered at the launch point and off we go and we’re dancing our asses off in the disco train past the Jean’s office who’s looking at us in confused shock. Then we turn around and realize our train only consists of four people as everyone else was still gathered at the launch point like cowards. Bastards. We even found two guys hiding under a desk because they didn’t want to do it. Oh well.
This was a practice run for a video we want to shoot with an end of day flash mob soul train. I told them if they couldn’t get it together, we would have to hire actors.
Saturday, headed up to the beach in Marin County for my team leader Matt’s birthday. Played beach volleyball until a dog came and poo’d on the court. My other team member, Wee, makes knives as a hobby so I gave him a sweet bamboo stick I’d found on the beach and asked him to clean up the ends to make me a Discipline Stick. I said I was gonna keep it in my cubicle so in the event of a Die-Hard terrorist takeover or alien invasion, I would have a ninja weapon on hand.
He pulled out a hunting knife and carved it on the beach. Wee’s Vietnamese so they were making fun of him for fulfilling a stereotype, carving bamboo with a knife while barefoot on a beach. T said all he needed was a triangle hat and an AK. When he finished, the stick was about the length of a riding crop but solid. I planted it in the sand next to me, then fell asleep. I don’t know what woke me up but I opened my eyes to see the stick in T’s hand as he was about to poke me with it. I grabbed it out of his hand. “Holy shit!” he said. “I thought you were asleep! You’re so ninja.”
I’d ridden up with Bohr and his girlfriend and they wanted to head back before the cake so I went with them. Got home to realize I’d put sunblock everywhere but my chest. Had a wicked V-burn. This is why I stay out of the sun.
James has been texting me again. Well, he never stopped I guess but I have only recently been responding. James was a guy I met last summer at a restaurant on Melrose. He’s an artist and a musician. Yeah, we had really great chemistry but he’s 16 years older than me, though I thought he was only a couple of years older when we first met. That surprised me. We had one really amazing date prowling the Venice Art Walk then crashing a rooftop party, but then afterwards I thought about where this could possibly go. What’ll happen is I’ll fall for you and then you’re gonna leave me alone with three kids, I told him.
I don’t know. One date. Really great conversation until the sun rose yet the lack of practical future, the fact he brought up physical intimacy like it was guaranteed which didn’t sit well with me (it never does), and the feeling that he had already planned out our future, then when I asked him what his last name was, he said “what are names but labels” and wouldn’t tell me…it just tweaked me out. We were supposed to meet up the next weekend, and my gut told me to postpone it to see his reaction. And he got upset. So then I got scared and stopped answering his texts or calls. He was very persistent, accused me of blowing him off because of something I saw in his astrology chart which I always thought was weird, but it was how aggressive he was that terrified me. I’m so wary of people taking advantage of my spiritual openness by trying to convince me they’re my destiny when they’re not. But even without any response from me, he kept texting. It was the final straw of LA weirdness, what made me move to Seattle to live in urban solitude and figure things out for myself.
It was strange though. He would still text me at the most uncanny times. Is he crazy, obsessed or is it really about something bigger? I had no idea, but what my time in Seattle taught me was that resistance and fear provide no answers. To follow intuition and flow.
Last month I found myself thinking back to that time. It was one year later from that magical summer of synchronicity and magnetic energy, full of chance encounters and a call to action. And I did think about him and strangely wish I could talk to him the way we did the two nights we met without being so scared of being forced to commit more than I wanted. Sometimes I wish the price of being understood isn’t having to allow myself to be owned.
It was right around that time when he texted me, asking if I was still alive, and it was a night I was drunk with the rich emotions of an approaching full moon. It had been almost a year since I’d responded to any of his messages but this time I wrote back asking him what he wanted from me. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t let go. He responded, “Nothing. We had an amazing night on a rooftop and I fell for you but you chose to move on.” I told him I wondered if he preferred it that way, as I felt he wasn’t into me as much as the idea of me. Through the texts that he sent me that I didn’t respond to, he’d told me he’d channeled his feelings into a song, and didn’t understand how someone could be so loving and present, and then disappear. It was the same feeling that he wanted me for something impossible on this earth, and if I were to let him love me, his disappointment would destroy me. I never believed it could be real, or that he would ever let it be real at such a close proximity, like Icarus reaching to touch the sun. Because I am just a girl who wants to dream of the moon, but wake up in the arms of a man who protects her because he loves her.
So I apologized for any pain I caused him because I never intended to hurt him but didn’t see a possible good outcome of what might have happened. I never messed with his feelings. In fact it was the opposite. I considered his feelings and I considered my own and I did what I thought was best by not getting into a potentially destructive situation that my intuition didn’t trust.
So we text every few days, and I know he wants me back, the me that was there that night. But he’s talking like I left something substantial and real but I don’t trust that it exists. Or even how real it was in the first place. I want to at least know if a friendship is real, if I can trust him as a friend. I want to be able to trust him as a friend because so few people understand me in this world. Then two days ago he said he loved me. Then yesterday he said that he knows he loves me more than I love him so I would always have the upper hand, so why not dive in.
Because I have a tendency to drown in air.
I don’t know what all this means. I feel like when something’s right, I’ll know it, and people who truly care about me will be happy for me. Because you don’t have to be my partner to make me happy. Care about me. Believe in me. Help light the way for me. That’s the best way to love me. I don’t always know where I’m going, but I’m going where I’m going, and I need people. I want people. But why do they always have to have that one spot to believe I care about them?
I think my world is complex but I’m a pretty simple person. I always try to do what I feel is right, and I want a home, someone and somewhere I can always return to.
James keeps thinking it’s my Gemini flightiness and game-playing that is keeping me from accepting him, but it’s my Cancerian need for a life partner and to find someone ultimately trustworthy before I open up my tender insides. Perhaps if he didn’t aim for that one spot when I’m not ready to give it up to him, he would find I am the same woman he met that night on the rooftop. But perhaps he only aims there because he likes the idea of it but doesn’t actually want it, so. He triggers my defenses as a way of also keeping him safe.
All I know is that I want something beautiful and real. And I’ve been waiting patiently for it. It’ll happen when it is right.