Talking Stones Project

First, the apology: This may be completely incomprehensible.

I don’t know if this can be adequately explained. Unless you’ve waited, and I mean really waited, for something. I mean the kind f long, agonizing waiting that usually means sitting with your head in your hands in a crappy, pink-vinyl chair next to a bed that’s on wheels, counting every second in your head with a beat like a drum. If you’ve waited like that, with every nerve tuned completely to detect the first moment when waiting turns to having, then you might have and idea. But only if what you were waiting for was for something to stop.

Today I woke up, and something amazing didn’t happen.

I didn’t reach for anyone.

Let me say it again, brothers and sisters: I didn’t reach for anyone.

I’ve been something of a serial monogamist for a while. I haven’t been out of a relationship for very long in a while. Like half my life. Now, part of that is because my relationships tend to last a while. But mostly, I’m coming to realize, it’s a problem with me. I think I’ve had so many problems being by myself that I have run from partner to partner in tight, tiny spirals. Don’t believe that this means I wasn’t really in any of these relationships--I have actually loved every woman I’ve ever told that I loved her. I threw my heart and soul into every one of them—I was as committed, as honest, and as on-board with being a couple as I must have seemed. But I also needed somebody to keep me from being alone.

And, because each and every time I was actually as in love as I said I was, I woke up every morning reaching for the girl I was with. Even mornings when I was away from them. I’m even a little proud to note that I never once reached for a woman other then the one that was actually in the bed with me. I guess my expectations have lowered.

And this morning I woke up the same way I always do, except completely differently.

I don’t know when it stopped. Somehow I doubt it was today. But somewhere in the last month-and-change, I stopped looking for something. Or, the optimist in me sings, you started looking in the right places for whatever you were reaching for. Fucking optimistic voices.

Either way, it stopped. And it feels like something titanic has shifted. I still want crazy, whacked-out love with somebody who’s going to want to go places with me and stay home with me and drive me crazy and let me sing to her and make out with me in the car on long drives and, well, everything. But the desperately hungry feeling is gone, and that makes me feel sane in a way that I forgot existed.

So. There.

# posted by Stephen Hungerford @ 2:16 AM