I am taking the day off from work to wait for a freight delivery — 330 pounds, consisting of a California king mattress, foundation, and pillows. The original plan had been to accept the delivery early in the day, and I could still go in to work and put in a half day. Not going to happen. If I were a wise man, I would use this time productively. However, I find that often when I am preoccupied with waiting for something (or someone), I can’t seem to focus my energies to effectively execute any other task of substance.
In a way it reminds me of Estragon and Vladimir’s fruitless wait for Godot. Time moved on, but they did not. Their absurd antics accomplished absolutely nothing. Life passed them by as they waited, and waited, and waited.
Now if you are expecting me to draw a ridiculous, tenuous parallel from the aforementioned to another, more significant part of my life, you came to the right place. If you are expecting me to use my blog writing as a means of cheap, dubiously effective, self-administered psychotherapy, well…again…
I am starting to come to terms with a roller coaster week that punctuated a long, fruitless wait of a romantic sort. About five months back, my feelings for a female acquaintance suddenly shifted outside the comfortable, uncomplicated realm of dispassion. How, why, or what the hell caused this shift to happen will not be discussed here, because even I know not the answer. Regardless, this person frustratingly became “unavailable” a short time later, so I resolved to patiently wait for the obviously inevitable passing of this temporary setback.
This conclusion came last week. Meanwhile, my feelings for this person had strengthened as I had finally allowed myself to get to know her. So, fueled by ego-driven self-delusion and a myriad of misinterpreted signals culled from ultimately worthless “how to tell if a woman is interested in you” self-help books and Google searches, I resolved to take action.
I sent her flowers. It was the first time that I had ever had flowers delivered to a woman. A few days later I declared my feelings to her. She met this declaration with flat-out rejection. The thought of me does not send shots of phenylethylamine coursing through her bloodstream.
While this unexpected resolution was a bit heart-wrenching, confusing, and humiliating; the silver lining is that it was, in fact, a resolution. Months of unrequited pining are finally over. It is time to move on.
The primary downside is that my ill-conceived revelation permanently altered my friendship with this woman. I earnestly hope the friendship is not damaged (I have been down that ugly road before; why did I not learn my lesson?), but it is foolish to assume that things will not be different, at least in the short term.
So now that the waiting is over, I now need to figure out how do I move on. It is time to break out of the absurdly non-eventful holding pattern that has constituted my social life. I have been contemplating a few of the online matching services, but the idea of multipage self-evaluation personality surveys makes me cringe. Maybe I will even try going back to church. Yes, visiting “God’s house” with an ulterior motive of meeting a significant other may be a bit crass, but people have attended church for worse reasons.
Now if my delivery would just get here. Anyway…
Well, shall we go?
Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
Leave a comment