Last Night

Janet Fitch once wrote, "Never expect to outgrow lonliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space."

Yesterday, I had the kind of sex Janet Fitch probably frowns upon.

He picks me up and takes me to his place downtown where he pours me drinks of names I hadn't heard before. The pauses in our conversations aren't interrupted by a song or an actress in a movie, instead, it's raw and it's natural. We laugh and we tickle. There is a sense of familiarity in our interactions, comfort and ease if you will. This clouds my judgment, but I knowingly follow his lead. Our time spent together is as short as the sentences in this paragraph, but I tell my conscious to shut up. I know he doesn't know. I know he doesn't know I can't spot constellations or that I sleep with my computer on. He doesn't know about my obsession with Friends or why I say no to movies. He doesn't know how many unworn dresses sleep in my closet. He doesn't know why I look away when he stares into my eyes for one second too long.

There is just so much he doesn't know, and yet last night we had sex. The in-the-moment sex. The because-it's-fun sex. The kind of sex that leaves you feeling emptier afterwards and having you wonder how many girls have had this sort of sex with him before you. The kind of sex you have for all the wrong reasons. Like a third glass of wine you probably shouldn't have poured alone on a Tuesday night, it's a temporary solution to a much bigger issue that only leaves you numb and more confused than before.

He won't understand because he won't even begin to try. He won't fill that space because he might care but not nearly enough. The timing isn't right, he'll say. We're just in different places, he'll say. Meanwhile Jane Fitch is shaking her head left and right in dismay because last night I lied next to him knowing I was only the next best thing on his wish-list, and that says more about my character than it does of his. It doesn't matter that I want to hear about his winter holidays back home or that I care to know his pet peeves. That I want to debate the -isms of the world with him and have him call me stubborn. None of that matters because he never did promise he won't ever leave. Yet I believed. I believed that he would have a moment of realization that I was worth that leap of faith and that I could fill a void of his that he didn't even know existed, just as he would mine. I believed Jane Fitch was wrong. Instead, I was wrong.

Now here I am with no glass of wine and totally fine. And yes, the glass of wine is a metaphor. And no, fine doesn't really mean I'm fine.