Ripped in Half (or Mystery Man #7)

First instincts are always the right ones...

Came home to find my gutter lying on my front walk way. Not all of it. Half of it. As if a Giant had come walking down my street, grabbed the middle of my front gutter, ripped it in half, crumpled it and dropped it in the center of my shoveled path. It bent, but did not break a first story window and landed neatly between the bottom two basement windows. Frank, having arrive home first, carefully placed the fallen and intact drain pipe up against the far side of the garage. It may not be the Ides of March, yet, but this seemed like a bad omen.

As I wrote last night, Mystery Man and I texted yesterday; I initiated. He replied with warmth, humor, apologies and a promise to call me soon. Tonight he did and now I wish I'd listened to my inner voice yesterday...the one that says when a man doesn't text for two weeks he's not that into you.

We talked for almost half an hour. Laughing, discussing our kids and sailing. He even said he'd had me, like it or not, enrolled on his friends' boat this summer as crew. Then as I started to yawn and said I wanted to cut to the chase, were we going to go on a date or not, he speech slowed down and became full of ums and ahs.

He then confided that the trip to Cali had been for the convention for the week and four additional days to see an old friend. He discussed how it's hard to be single at this age, and how a shared history is important and how he'd had hopes for him and this old friend, but there were too many obstacle, distance being one of them. I listened, politely, and not unsympathetically. But as he continued, I briefly hoped that our half hour of fluid conversation was leading to how our common interests and proximity were what he was wanting to pursue.

When I again, asked to cut to the chase, about if we would date, he grew quiet. More ums and ahs. I then knew for sure that I was not what he was looking for in some way. Perhaps not the younger model most middle aged men hope to find as mortality faces them in the mirror. He said he wanted to see me and get to know me, but not in that way.

On one hand I was impressed by his honesty. On the other I felt the catch in my voice and the sting of the judgment. My cache has fallen and I may not get up.

I told him that wasn't what I'd hoped to hear, but it is what it is. He said he wanted to call me after his daughter returned to college and I said, sure. Although I think we both know he won't.

What is so strange about this is that earlier, when he was discussing his old friend and I said I was still friends with old boyfriends and understood the impulse for that return to a shared history, I also know that all my old boyfriends could not be my mates now. There were reasons we broke up, at an earlier and less mature time of our lives. Most of our lives have diverged significantly. When people ask me, point blank, "We'll there must be somebody you have crush on or an old flame you'd like to rekindle", I honestly and much to their amazement say, "No, there isn't."

You see that is the hardest part about being alone and single in middle age. The hardest part of getting divorced wasn't letting go of my husband, he had left me long before I asked him to go. No the hardest part if letting go of that imagined self of the future as a couple and the shared history of the past.

At this age, when you do meet some one who says "we have so much in common" and you feel it in your bones, too, and get excited about the potential of getting to know them better and perhaps, wonder of wonder, miracles of miracles, have a shared future that becomes a history ; it's exciting.

So now I feel like I've been torn in half by a Giant who just walked down my street, looked in my bedroom window, and said, "Sorry this one's not for you", and ripped my hopes in half, just like the crumpled, bent and misshapen gutter laying 20 feet below my bed. I'm not built for this new climate.

Time to go back to suggesting to the universe to place a man in my path who is worthy of my time and attention.....oh to be adored and not thought of as not the right stuff and expendable.

Thus end's the Mystery Man missives...unlucky #7.

Good night, Universe ~ hear me, G'night!