Crushes

AJ

London, Again

o2

I first moot the idea of meeting up with Tee casually one Saturday evening, between getting a snapshot of her calendar for the next few months – it is chock full with work and travel – and getting tips for scaling back on my coffee drinking, after which it turns out that there are no airports in her corner of the world. That puts the downer on any inclinations to jump on a flight on my part – I famously never travel anywhere I’ll have to sit still for more than 8 hours – until she mentions she might be in London sometime over the next few weeks. It turns out I only get four days notice, and I barely have time to sort out fights and holidays, hop on a flight and appear in London.

She is someone I’ve wanted to meet in person for a while. Since we were introduced, we’ve restricted ourselves to a telephone conversation now and again, and the odd picture swap on WhatsApp – hardly enough to get a sense for what makes her tick or if indeed she just be might the future Mrs S. 🙂

I end up not getting a holiday approved, eventually settling for a quick 36 hour round trip – up to London at mid day on Saturday and back into the ‘Deen for 8pm on sunday night. That leaves me just enough time to get to the gym on Saturday morning, grab my weekly groceries, shower and catch the 727 to the airport at Dyce for my 1.25pm flight.

In the end, my Saturday morning does not work like a well oiled machine. The gym opens 15 minutes late, ASDA’s slightly more full than I recall for a Saturday morning, and I end up back home for just past 11.45am. By the time I have showered, and tossed a pair of jeans and a change of clothes in my bag, it is nearly 12.10pm; too late to catch the 727 so I high tail it to the taxi rank on Union Street and grab a cab, thanks to whose dexterity and quick thinking, I end up at the airport and clear security five minutes before the boarding announcement is made.

By the time I arrive in London, to much wetter, chillier weather than the last time, all that is on my mind is to find my way to the obscure hotel I have booked in Central London and some food. It takes me the better part of an hour and thirty minutes to reach the hotel via the Piccadilly Line to Cockfosters and the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus.  Food ends up being Nandos, thankfully spotted as I made my way thanks to Google Maps via a few backstreets to the hotel. Intermittent text messages between myself and Tee end up being the inspiration to soldier on amidst all my tribulations.

 As I always do on these trips, I make a pitstop at the Dominion Theatre for Hillsong, fortuitously they have a guest speaker on the day, Dr Mal Fletcher on the subject of Being a Marketplace Transformer and how Christians need to engage and transform it rather than ignore it for our bubbles. It is a fitting start to what turns out to be a great day about town.

Tee turns out to be way more gorgeous than her pictures suggest, and we have enough of shared interests to have a wide ranging conversation about anything and everything; so much so that over per-peri chicken and coke zero we talk for so long it is nearly 5pm by the time I reluctantly pull away for the wild race to Heathrow.

Three train changes later, I make it through security at Heathrow, barely in time again; thankful for a delayed flight than ever before, and giddy at just how great an evening I have had.. Somewhere in my heart, my inner romantic hopes that I may have just met theOne 🙂

AJ

2012 – The Year of the Detox

 

Although a  year and some ago I thought I had truly gotten over the pain of the EJ debacle, I still managed to spend Christmas stateside attending a wedding, hanging with mutual friends and kind of hoping I would run into her. Neither happened, and when push came to shove I couldn’t bring myself to take the short hop across town to the city where she now lived. Coming into 2012 then, the target was to resolve a number of the other friendzoneships  I had somehow gotten sucked in over the years.

Clarity would end up being delivered spectacularly through the year – hanging with R when she passed through my city in March confirmed what we both knew since our undergraduate days, that we were great as wingmen/women for each other, but lousy at everything else besides, my hankering for my Dalglish conjecture came and went  – appropriately chided of course, P and I managed to let crazy work schedules and a significant time difference wreck what had seemed like a pretty good start, and then there was L.

L was the kick up the backside I needed: smarts, attractiveness, a big heart for God and children and an appreciation of the arts ensured she ticked all my critical boxes. It helped that she was also in the same city (for a change!) and we had similar work interests. Being around her put the last eighteen months in perspective and showed me quite starkly what I had missed by failing to move on. We didn’t quite work out – my penchant for complicated women rearing it’s head one more time – but the one thing meeting her did was finally hammer home what my wing-women extraordinaire Izz  & Dee had harped on all year round – that I needed to get off my backside and explore.

Once again, there have been lessons learned this year – that there is a shed load of stuff I need to learn about me, about women, about my long term direction and the type of woman I am attracted to.  That, and a paradigm shift of sorts, perhaps best articulated by Clay Christensen in his book How Will You Measure Your Life:

The path to happiness (in a relationship) is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.

I suspect that when/if the annals of my life are written in the future, 2012 will feature prominently as the year of the big reset, the year wherein the penny dropped. All told, it’s been a year of pruning, spring cleaning, gaining clarity and working out the toxins and nascent hurts from the past. I suspect 2013 will be the year of learning and re-learning… And hopefully finding and building… :)

AJ

#130 – Osmosis

Delirium, for the We Write Poems prompt Osmosis;

~~~~

You catch her eye
on the corner of King’s
and Guild’s, rush
of bright pink, blush.
Gaze, furtive.

A coy smile
works its way
across her face,
before she disappears.
A bird, startled as by
a twig snapped underneath
the lumbering feet
of her unwary hunter-
Half dream, half mirage,
half stolen, garbled-
fairy tale.

You feel the fever-
dry skin, throbbing head.
Unrequited memory like
the force of a hammer
against rock, a blunt axe,
Patagonian rosewood, a caged bird,
tethered to it’s roost.

Your siren’s sung-
her half song, half lure.
And like five bowstrings
plucked till worn-
all you have
is the unsated thirst
of your delirium.

AJ

Girl Crush-ing… Hypothetically….

I think I have a crush.

…… And what is perhaps most disconcerting about the waxing and waning of this particular attraction is just how atypical its advent has been.  For one she is well and truly outside the +/- 2.5 year band that I once swore to live and die by… And perhaps most importantly, the sum of our interaction over the last one month, one week and six days has been fifteen emails, five phone calls and one handshake; hardly a compelling oeuvre for a bloke whose standard MO – bar the not exactly happily-ever-after spring misadventure from 2009 – has primarily been based on weighing pros and cons, extensive googling due diligence  and incremental engagement rather than a full on pursuit.

My friend Des seems to think there’s at least something to explore, but I suspect it might just be a case of cake cravings on her part (she’s called dibs already on providing the little bride)… Me the cynic thinks it’s more molehill than mountain and that lurking just beyond the edge of what little I know are revelations bound to kick this delirium into touch… Me the pragmatist agrees with Des, and thinks it would at least be useful practice, bringing me closer to the magic 12 number which supposedly is the ideal number of partners required to define our dating baseline.

Me the analytical, in the few quiet moments the cacophony in my head allows me, wonders if there’s some low risk, non-intrusive way of closing the knowledge gap and progressing the opportunity (which may or may not be there)… Or if a wild plunge isn’t the way to go here…… After all someone once said doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result was insanity….

Or not….

AJ

A Passing Fancy…

Day Zero.
You meet her on one of those days. Boredom morphs into irritation, topped off with despondency. Your 8-4 (5-9) is especially dull on the day. Madam Bosco, your loud mouthed, over-bearing boss rips into you as usual over the ever yawning chasm between your targets and your deliveries. The heat seems to have major intentions of causing grievous bodily harm in any case. That is when the ‘gods’ of the internet and itchy fingers contrive to send Her your way.

It ostensibly is an error of the digits – two numbers on the key pad transposed – that makes her call you. You are in no mood for niceties and you utter a few choice words and end the phone call. Perhaps she is hurt, but she opts to send you an SMS apologizing for the mix-up.

You have had the time to think on your commute home – and you give her a call to apologize right back. She giggles, and says she instigated the entire brouhaha, you insist you reacted over the top. Bottom line you become friends.

Day Seven
By now you know she is an intern in the oil firm you always wanted to work for, she loves poetry, pretended to write some of her own a few years ago and loves Pavarotti. You though are stuck in the lurch as an investment banker in some lousy bank. You quickly slip in though that you have a trip to SA lined up, plus your last vacation was in Paris – so she knows you can hold down it down pay wise if you need to.

You have settled into a steady rhythm: three phone calls a day, multiple emails and then the lunch break IMs. You become her nice guy; the bloke who listens to her rants from work, her angst at her over bearing father, her irritation with her football crazy brothers and oh yes…… shoes…in all their gory coloured incarnations. You tell her stuff you’ve never told anyone, your deepest secrets, inner most fears, plans and some of the ideas you want to turn to gold in a few years time. She cheers you on, analysing the pros and the cons. Not since your big sister did any one get you on the same level.

Day Thirty
She’s headed off an a holiday, and she is passing through the city you call home. She decides to squeeze a whole day out of her schedule just to see you. You think it’s a fabulous idea and you agree to meet up. She is truly fabulous much better than you imagined. Everything is spot on; she is Cerruti perfumed and Diesel jeans plus spaghetti top clad. Add to that her glistering lip gloss, her CK glasses and her clutch specially chosen to match the colour of her spaghetti top and you know you have a keeper on your hands.

You read her a few brilliant lines you penned – just for her – you say; a parody of the finest Amiri Baraka there is out there. She is wowed, you order dinner and the chemistry is palpable. You talk for a couple of hours, swap some more poetry and then she has to head out to catch her flight. She shyly attempts to kiss you on the cheek. You both laugh at the clumsy attempt, you hold hands and look into her eyes and you believe your Mama’s travails are over.

Day Fourty
More of the same stuff, phone calls, emails, IMs, plus the occasional emailed picture as a keep sake. Life’s good you think. You the pragmatist tells you  the romantic that it is too good to be true. You the cynic refuses to participate in an exercise in futility. ‘All’s cool and kosher’, you reason, ‘why try to define things beyond what they are anyway’.

Day Sixty.
She’s heading back to school. You have got a huge target to meet at work, so naturally you drift apart. The phone calls reduce, the emails dwindle and the IMs now become short bursts of offline messages. You the cynic blithely mentions that it was all doomed to fail anyway. You the pragmatist thinks its busyness squeezing the life out of your US zone. You the romantic thinks it’s a fading fancy and couldn’t care less; choosing to bounce to Brandy’s song instead.

Day Ninety
You the romantic and you the cynic prevail on you the pragmatist to agree to a phone call. That should be the ultimate test of where you are.

You ring her up, there’s no pick up the first time. You wait for the usual SMS, nothing comes. You give it two more days and then you try again. The third time of asking she picks up your phone call. The talk is stilted, almost foreign. You the cynic pouts and reminds you the romantic that it was an exercise in futility doomed to fail from the get go. You the pragmatist takes it philosophically, it was not meant to be.

In the instant the phone call ends, it suddenly hits you – clarity knocks you in the small of your stomach. This was no divine serendipity; it was just hideous self delusion. You were only her harmattan fling.