I do surprising things when I drink.
Once a girlfriend and I calculated how many guys we'd had interludes with and tried to factor in how many would have happened if we didn't count the ones that happened at night. We decided we would have been very single and without a lot of amusing dating stories.
The other night after a few cocktails I drunk emailed.
I've matured past drunk dialing or drunk texting and moved on to drunk emailing. It was almost like I was possessed and even sort of looking down on myself watching me and the whole time thinking what are you doing? I'm sure that when he reads it he's going to wonder where the hell that came from and why I felt the need to suddenly share an amusing story about a squirrel.
There's this guy at my work who is engaged. Him and his fiancee are revoltingly cute. She came in the other day to visit him and they stood at the counter making googily eyes at each other. It reminded me of a tall stranger on the other side of a counter I once knew. It also made me realize how jaded I've become. The other day as I walked around couples at the mall, I looked at them distrustingly. I doubted their fidelity, their sincerity. I feel like Prince Charming took something from me I hadn't even noticed I'd lost: he took a portion of my optimism. In the span of very few moons, I'd become a realist. Somewhere the naively hopeful optimist of years past had died and somewhere between her and the jaded, cynical pessimist was me.
And at first, this revelation kind of pissed me off. That son of a bitch was making me doubt a lot of things, second guess my own heart, my own fate.
And that was my fault, not his. I let him play that role, I let him mistakenly stand on that pedestal.
And maybe the truth was, removing that pedestal was a good thing.
Maybe seeing people for the ugly, flawed, shallow beasts that they are was the biggest surprise of all.
Because somewhere, buried inside, I could love the monsters.
And that made me a pretty stellar woman.
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