Lightning

My best friend once compared me to a cheap blender. He said, "You only have two speeds: Off and Liquefy. No in-between." He was of course, referring to my most recent infatuation with a certain neurosurgeon who, when we were together, acted like he was madly in love with me, but when we were apart, was hard put to remember my name. My behavior was less than dignified.

I'm an all or nothing kind of girl. I have very definite opinions about things. Tattoos and body piercings are low class and trashy. Period. No, I don't care if it's a picture of a heart or a flower placed on the line of your underwear where no one can see it. Chocolate was, is and always will be better than vanilla. Get over it. Ping pong is not a sport, I don't care what the Olympics has to say. Size matters. Oh. Yes. It. Does.

I guess I bring this attitude to my relationships. If I'm crazy about a guy, then I'm really crazy about him, obsessed, maybe even a little manic. I think about him all the time, analyze what he said, what he didn't say, what he could have said. I take action. I plan things, picnics, dinners, look for events that he would be interested in and buy tickets for them; I buy him things that he may mention in passing that he needed, or was thinking about getting, and wrap it up prettily attached with a hand-made card that I drew.

I even notice it in the way I feel about random, everyday things. "I loved that movie." "I hate shellfish." Lots of Love and Hate. No real Like, Fine, Okay in my vocabulary. If I describe someone I've met as shoulder-shrug okay, you can be sure that I'm pretty much ambivalent, and ambivalent in my world means its the end of the line. I won't give it another chance. I don't have that kind of patience.

I often wonder if that's why I can't find a relationship that works. My other best friend keeps trying to instill in me the "slow and steady wins the race" mentality. But I'm looking to get hit by lightning. I don't want to keep going out with shoulder shrug okay to see if anything develops, I want my knees to go weak when I see him. I want my pulse to race, I want to be frantic when he calls, and shop for hours for the perfect outfit to wear on our next date because I give a shit what he thinks. Shoulder shrug okay doesn't evoke these feelings or actions.

I met the neurosurgeon in July. The frequency of my meeting a man that feels like lightning struck me runs akin to that of lightning striking the same place twice, almost never. I'm actually on a two to three year cycle. Once every two to three years, I find him, and it strikes, and my hair stands up on end. The reason the neurosurgeon hit so hard was because he's the first one I didn't actually get. It was disconcerting, it threw me off. But at least now I have a year and nine months to plan for the next one. He's not getting away, even if I have to stand outside flying a kite in a thunderstorm.