A Dating Story - Pt. 19

What is my life if my parents…my sibling, didn’t die?

The pitter-patter of keystrokes served as surround sound to her increasing unease. No different from the fly that you can’t catch at dinner that continues to buzz at your ear every three minutes over the flat noodles, chicken, and garlic sauce you’ve finally got right after four unsavory attempts. Armed with the swatter and the determination to end the torment.

Sasha dug the fingernails of her left index and middle finger into her left earlobe. Not for punishment but as an expedient self-soothing mechanism. Emotional regulation. Sasha could tap into another plane to center herself. She could control that. She kept that with her from her jaunt to mandated therapy in the aftermath of the warhead that reconfigured the direction of her life.

In the aisle, a refreshment cart burped as a result of a bum wheel that needed replacing two years ago. There were peanuts - salted and honey roasted, which were packed with high levels of sodium - and pretzels. Soda, wine, and fruit juice were available. After rolling her eyes at the selection, she returned her left hand to the arm rest.

Sasha forced her fountain pen to add to the etching on the diminishing blank pages remaining inside her journal. Each time she started to answer the question she’d written, repeated backwards, and mumbled… The ink had no retort. She allowed the instrument to slumber atop the page.

Her emotional retreat was invaded. Self revolt. Not a single outside agitator could be blamed, arrested, sent to trial, and sentenced.

She wondered if she was currently the person she was meant to be. Unattached to themes of fate. Destiny. No. Would she be the same, today, if her family wasn’t taken from her, then? Is Sasha an identical version of…Sasha with her parents waiting for her to dial safely once she touched down in Barcelona?

An attempt to sleep through her self interrogation was an unfair fight. Her mind shifted elsewhere.

People mutate into several forms across the span of a lifetime. There’s no guarantee that the next form will be recognizable. It’s the core reason why people are frightened by relationships. Even the most prepared of us. Even your best friend who read all the books on attracting the person who you are. Or the other manuscript about not chasing people but making sure that they are the ones hunting you. Or the daters who feel that travel and wine around the clock are personality traits.

If someone sucked the air out of every room blabbing about a love for cocaine the way those among us confess an undying devotion and infatuation with chardonnay, pinot, red blends, etc., which of those two people would be considered an unmistakable candidate for professional treatment?

A mutation shuns logic. Probabilities. Possibility. Unattached, it is to the hopes and desires of others. Tying your life to someone that will change inside the relationship might upend 5-30 years of certainty that you felt you surely attained. You signed up for the memories well into retirement and relocating to sunnier zip codes. Look at all the anniversaries you two shared.

The key in observing the mutation without paralyzing terror is to understand that the person you love will change. Dare to say, should change. Accept that early on and it should save you months of sleepless nights. Both of you should experience multiple rebirths. Like a butterfly that doesn’t die after their metamorphosis, but as humans who enter a cocoon every few years for their gestation – and reappear. Pieces remaining of their former self may vary. The outside is recognizable but the soul, process of thought, goals, deeply held concerns, etc., are likely under reconstruction. Be certain this is an ongoing event.

Those in relationships encounter nightmares because of this. If you haven’t, you might not be of the Earth. Humans ache for long-term commitment but they also hold the notion that it’s unattainable over a lifetime. Two things can be true in the same moment. Even if they seem contradictory. Divergent.