A messy patch of not quite wildflowers near the garden late this morning. I needed to go back there at some point today to offer support to the borage, which was growing so fast I found it leaning precariously yesterday morning.
More fool me thinking after the annual meeting this would be a quieter month for the League. We got that big (for us) grant from the city but none of us have dealt with this kind of contract before and the person that initiated the grant application and will run the grant itself is in London and our Office Manager is in Chicago for a wedding. Eek. The city wants stuff by Monday. Oh joy, we all haven’t a clue what we are doing. Stressful.
Mr. B. did not come over Monday night to talk, he did Facetime me as he was walking down the street and we had a strange conversation that didn’t amount to much except that because I had League stuff to do (and was mad at Walt) Thursday, yesterday I told him I wasn’t going to Dialogue Group this week and he said I will come over then and we will talk.
I wanted to send him the poem I had written about our first few weeks together (I had read it to my class and to the Dialogue Group), but I wasn’t sure he had access to email because he keeps getting hacked as he has no idea how to keep himself or his stuff safe on the internet and a friend of his introduced him to Instagram and he is like a kid in a candy store with it.
Writing, thinking, about what had happened and was happening I couldn’t see a path forward if he thought establishing a relationship with me carried enough of a stigma to create major issues for him with his minders and his sons, not to mention the people we thought were mutually our friends.
Those were a dark couple of days.
In a text exchange he said he was worried about me, and I was like you need to go to Dialogue group without me and then he said he couldn’t because he had an appointment with his parole officer but that he was coming over just after my class on Thursday before his appointment.
I was not certain he would actually show up and so I thought about what I wanted to say if he did show up and how I would handle all this and had butterflies in my stomach and my teaching, sadly, was a bit less than fully coherent plus all this League stuff was going on. My class ends at 8:30 but some folks usually stick around for 15 minutes or so to talk about the poem.
Out of the blue at 8:29 I get a text from Walt’s partner. I can’t stop and read it because I am still engaged with my students who really wanted to talk about the poem. Then at 8:32 I get a text from Mr. B. WTF? Walt’s partner cuts my hair, that is the only time I have ever exchanged texts with her. By this time, I am a complete basket case. What is going on?
It turns out Walt has shared one of my poems with her that she liked and she took this extremely odd time to tell me so. Mr. B. was on his way over. I tried deep breaths and tried to address the League stuff I could, but I was questioning my sanity at that point.
Could someone explain how the offer to go for an afternoon walk with a guy just out of prison turned into such incredible high-stakes drama in the manner of a few weeks.
Oh, well falling in love with him might have had something to do with it. He was falling for me too. This is not one sided.
(As a funny aside, there was this article in the style section of the New York Times a few weeks back about how all the guys in the know are wearing those white ribbed undershirts these days. “Why Are So Many Men Wearing Tank Tops?” Mr. B. has been wearing one and I teased him about it over the weekend. He hasn’t been able to choose what he wears for a long time.)
He shows up kind of breathless and immediately takes off his shirt, glasses and hat and I am like…okay, and this means? It meant he had practically run over here because he was late and no, he hadn’t talked to Walt or his partner since Sunday night and no they did not know he was coming over and…
I told him that I had previously had things to say to him but at that point I didn’t see the point. I had made the decision to extricate myself from Walt’s world, wasn’t sure exactly how to do that but he was now free to do anything he wanted with them all stigma free. He bristled and reached for his hat and asked should I go now then, it’s over?
And I came very close to letting him go… so close.
But instead, we talked for another hour and a half about a lot of stuff and though I felt it wasn’t a difficult conversation, it felt definitive.
The conclusion we came to was that considering that there is seriously no future for us as a couple in any kind of traditional sense, why don’t we just have fling.
That is just between us, two consenting adults and nobody else’s business.
So that is what we are going to do.
I am so looking forward to this. More than I have anything in a good long while.
My birthday is in two weeks. I am planning on enjoying the heck out of it.
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