Chapter 41: Ramble On

CW: This chapter contains a description of sexual violence.

For several months following Jack’s declaration of divorce, I doubled down on dating. Although the term ‘dating’ might be misleading. To my mind, dating suggests getting to know another person, a process that occurs over time, a gradual revelation of and to, with an expanding degree of friendship and intimacy. By this definition, I wasn’t dating. More like pursuing, maybe, or chasing, like the heroine of a romcom that has 90 minutes to get the guy.

I qualified my subjects by certain basic criteria—attractive, good job, nice enough. Once a man passed muster, I set him in my sights. You! Or you…or you. The most essential quality was that they provided a refuge from my feelings. Many people pursue relationships because of what they want to feel. I sought relationships that spared me from what I didn’t.

Since Viktor was away on a motorcycle trip when Jack dropped the bomb, I had no hope of seeing him for a while, so I found a new someone as quick as I could.

He looked like Jason Momoa in Conan the Barbarian with thick waves of long brown curls, tannish skin, and blue eyes. His loveliness was absurd.

He wore his hair in a braid the day we met for lunch. We took a walk afterwards and roamed past his house. He asked if I’d like to see the deck he just completed. During the tour I noticed a jar full of weed on his kitchen table. He’d been sober since his divorce, he said, which sounded insane to me. Why would you stop drinking as you were going through one of life’s worsts? He said he never quit smoking weed, though; he smoked all day, every day. I figured this preserved the possibility that we could hang out. I couldn’t remember how you did it if you weren’t at least a little fucked up, especially with someone you never wanted to love.

Conan and I wandered around his house, which was only partially furnished. He said I should see his yoga loft.

“Sure,” I agreed.

His yoga mat was rolled out in front of the only window, and there was a thin mattress on the floor with a blood stain in the corner—I guessed it was probably some woman’s menstrual blood. It was an odd thing to encounter with a stranger, but if he remembered it was there, he didn’t show it. We made out near the stain. He asked for a blow job. My inside voice shrugged but my outside voice was enthusiastic. After he came, he handed me a bottle of water and offered to walk me back to my car. The following week he texted to say he was going the monogamous route with another woman he’d been seeing recently.

In a therapy session with Dianne around that time, I told her I was still sad about Gavriel. Or maybe it wasn’t really about him, but who I wished he would have been.

“Try and stay with yourself,” she told me. “It’s like you go out of yourself to meet these men, Minda. Stay with yourself. What is there for you?”

I had no idea what she was talking about but I wrote it down in my journal anyway so I would remember to contemplate it later. Like maybe if I just thought more about it, I’d finally catch on. Because I didn’t understand that the real problem was that I had no self to stay with. For so many years I’d been seeking validation from sex, from men…I had no idea who I was. Which meant, in certain contexts—(whenever a man was remotely involved)—I had no self to stay with.

Shortly after Conan dropped off, I started chatting with a guy who had recently opened his marriage of several years. This seemed like a good thing, because it would give me a perfectly plausible—and impersonal—reason for ending things when I felt like it. I figured I would just tell him I wanted a partner who was more available.

We had an okay time over drinks. He was kind of a plain white dude—nothing about him stood out—but he seemed reasonably competent, so I agreed to stay for dinner. We were kissing after the meal when I expressed a casual regret that we didn’t have any place we could go. I didn’t actually care about spending more time with him; I was only feeding his desire for me by making him feel wanted. I knew there was no way we were going to sleep together because we had nowhere to go; I was still living with Jack and his wife was at home. We said goodbye and departed. I stopped in the restroom on my way out.

Moments later, I opened the front door of the restaurant to find him standing there, obstructing the path to my car.

“I got us a hotel,” he said. He was so proud of himself.

“What the fucking fuck?”

That’s what my inside voice said. But my outside voice responded differently.