GFMorris.com

Were it not better to forget
Than but remember and regret

– Letitia Elizabth Landon, Despondency

Last Saturday, I helped Jeff grill up burgers and dogs for Amy’s birthday bash, but I wasn’t able to stay long without the cat hair causing my lungs to explode. I bid everyone adieu, and then headed over to the Granades’, figuring that Misty would be up, working on the cross-stitch project she’s been madly trying to finish for a while.

I ended up staying there until almost 0100, as our conversation provided just enough distraction for her to work efficiently on the project, which she finished while we were there. We rambled through a number of discussion topics—which surprises no one who’s had a conversation with me that lasted more than, oh, five mintues; this went more like five hours—and one of them was silly relationship stories. Misty’s a great person for me to talk to for perspective—not only is she a good friend, but she and Stephen have been married for a decade. [In fact, their 10th anniversary was my brother's wedding day. I love it when dates line up and make it easy for me to remember.]

I have never been a ladies’ man—to be honest, I purposely didn’t date in high school. There are two reasons for this: when I was at Forest High, I really didn’t want to date any of the folks from that town, because I didn’t want to associate myself with it at all. Snobbish, but there it is. And when I was at MSMS, well, I made the conscious decision to not date anyone because I didn’t want any relationships to sway my college decision. Mom always said I was a weird kid, and well … it’s true.

In any regard, one story I told was about someone I’ll call … R. She came along at a bad time for me, in this nice, ugly period after the first girl I’d really pursued spurned me, started dating a guy I knew a few days later, and then suckered me to be a groomsman in their wedding. It was a bad time, especially for my liver. [Okay, that's exaggerating.] Anyhow, that period was pretty bad for me, as all my notions about how to go about these female creatures were thrown all a-kilter. Somewhere along here, I realized that some dumb teenage dating was probably the cure for my issues, but I was 19 or 20 and that ship had already sailed.

So, into that maelstrom sails R, who was one of the prettier girls at UAH at the time. If I were to ever list a ton of qualities for a girl to have—and I don’t believe in doing so, because I think that sets up horrible expectations, but that’s another story entirely—she would have had most all of them. Heck, she was even Methodist. I didn’t notice at first that she was really working to spend a lot of time around me, mainly because I was in the process of running for Executive Vice-President of UAH’s student government, and that was pretty well consuming me. But I eventually noticed, and … I was like a deer in headlights. Here, I’ll cut to our conversation [and I'm paraphrasing]:

Me: “And I froze, and I didn’t know how to handle the situation at all. Here was a great, wonderful young woman, seemingly quite interested in me, and I was in this place where I just was naturally assuming that all women would drop me after they got to know me.”

Misty: “Ouch.”

“When I didn’t respond to her, she seemed to grow bitter, and definitely pulled away. Since then, every time I’ve run into her, we have these surface conversations in groups of people, but I usually end up catching her looking at me with a slightly pained expression. I wish I’d been able to say to her at the time, ‘Look, I’m coming out of a really crappy relationship. My head is not in a good place.’ ”

“Well, that’s an awfully mature conversation to be having at that age.”

I didn’t say anything, but right then, Misty was working on some detailed counting thing, and she may not have noticed. But that sorta hit me like a shotgun blast to the face. I’ve learned lately to not regret trying and failing, although trying can certainly be difficult at times given some circumstances; I’ve been far more frustrated with those situations where I’ve not tried at all and been left wondering. When I think of standing at the plate with the bat glued to my shoulder, R’s advances to me always come to mind, and I mentally kick myself. But … Misty’s right, and as I’ve ruminated on that some this week, it’s helped, a lot.

Thanks, dear.