Out of the Bottle

Derek II pried the Taylor* situation out of me this afternoon. I had moped around teary all day. It was not a miracle someone had noticed.

I hadn't planned on telling anyone, especially not at work. I resisted, too. "If i talk about it, i'll probably start to cry," i said.

"You can cry," said Derek.

"It's supposedly unprofessional to cry at work," i replied.

Well, i wound up talking about it. For more than 1.5 hours. And i didn't cry.

And it did help. More than i would've expected. Hearing myself out loud on Taylor made him more real and less of a god - the perfect mate that got away.

And, ultimately, all human beings want to be heard.

At one point i said, "There's this one guy on [the online dating site i'm on], whom i never contacted, who wrote this great line. It goes, 'Everybody has baggage. It matters only where you put it.'"

Derek nodded in concert.

"I still don't know where to put mine," I continued. "It's all over the place. I don't know about other folks... Sometimes a piece drops out of an overhead compartment and hits you smack in the head when you least expect it."

Derek laughed. Oh, wow, i made someone laugh. Which was one of the things missing, incidentally, with Taylor.

Derek says it takes half the time you were with someone to get over them. (I've heard different versions, i'm sure.) If that is true, though, i'll be over Taylor on 8/20.


*Not his real name