I'll Know When I See It

Oh look at that one! It's great. Well, except for the smell, and that whole thing going on with the one wall there and there's a window that's leaking. But it's great, right?!

Note the edge of desperation. Possibly it's because I've been thinking about dating a lot lately. That sounds wrong. I'm not thinking of me currently dating anyone except my husband. Although, it has been said of us that we do still act like we're dating. I'll take that as a compliment. I'm working on a project. It's a project about projects, in a way, so my dating life has been shuffled around to the forefront of the rummage sale in my head.

Possibly it's because I've been thinking about dating a lot lately, but I'm feeling a little desperate. That also sounds wrong. I'm desperate, but I wasn't particularly desperate while I was dating. Most of the time. But right now, this thing I've been feeling lately, reminds me of the time that maybe once or twice I did feel like that.

We're looking for a house. It feels like everyone around us is happily pairing up with their perfect houses and living their perfect lives and we're the ugly kids on the edge of the dance. We finally work up our confidence to go over and make an offer on one, with our sweaty palms and our shaky knees and our tiny earnest money and just as we're about to get there, someone dashing and confident and gorgeous steps in front of us and takes it. Oh well, we say. They probably would have said no anyway.

I look at houses and I think "Oh, this one is handsome, but not my type. The roof also appears to be a little leaky."

I look at other houses and I think "I'm in the wrong place. They will never accept me."

I look at still other houses and I think "If I could change this, this, and this... then maybe I could live with it."

And the most humiliating of all, well-meaning people say "Oh, what about this one? I think it would be perfect!" and I look and I cry. Because it's under a bridge, or the bathroom is caving in, or it reeks of cat food and old lady and I think someone died there and was eaten by cats. Or because it seems perfectly fine on the surface and then you look deeper and the 147 Marilyn Monroe posters in the basement are covering some serious mold. And then I cry. I cry because I don't feel like I deserve a nice house, that my expectations are too high, that I should accept my lot in life and be grateful for the mold and the Marilyn Monroe posters and the corpse and the cat pee smell.

People who have done this before smile smugly and nod while they glance around their own cat-pee free houses and say "Don't worry, honey. It will be your turn. When you find the right one, you'll just know." And I hate them for that because I know that they are right, but I am tired and I am hungry and my clothes smell like the living of dozens of other people because I've traipsed through their lives and looked in their cupboards and in the dark places where no one goes - the furnace room, the basement, the garage, some showers. I've looked at the hopeful pipes and utility closets and "cozy eat-in kitchens" of strangers who have gussied and styled and preened, all with their own scent of desperation and I have found them wanting. I hate them and I'm tired. I hear myself saying the dreaded words "Maybe we'll just go live in the suburbs. Maybe we should just settle."

I'm not asking for much. I'm just asking for perfect. But you don't understand. "Perfect" for me is flawed and quirky and wonderful and strange. I don't need the flashiest, the showiest, the latest craze, the most stylish. I just need right for me. I have standards you couldn't possibly understand. I just know I'll know when I see it. 

One Love

He wasn't the first, nor was he the worst. He certainly wasn't the last.
He just... was.
He was neither good looking, nor smart. He was a tedious and dull conversationalist. He didn't have any passions, to speak of. He didn't believe anything. He wasn't a very hard worker, but he wasn't spectacularly lazy, either. He wasn't particularly good-hearted, but he wasn't evil. He didn't seek any kind of greater good; he didn't really seek anything at all.
He just kind of... was.

He was a friend of friends. We ran loosely in the same circles. He was always just kind of... there. He wasn't particularly outgoing or funny. In fact, the only reason I noticed him at all was because I found him vaguely repellent. He had bad skin. Not acne, per se. Not the sort of grotesque acne that, when outgrown, would give him a certain pockmarked ruggedness. He just had random pustules. Mammoth whiteheads in odd places that would stay around for days. I couldn't talk to him without wanting to reach out and pop them. His chin was minimal and it seemed like all of his teeth grew in on top of each other right in the front. He was a little bit shorter than I am, and a little bit pigeon-toed. He laughed at his own jokes and did Beavis and Butt-Head impersonations. We had nothing in common. Except Bob Marley. We dated for six months.

He bought me a One Love bumper sticker for my car, which pretty much guaranteed my getting pulled over all the time. He said we had that One Love. That universal, all encompassing, gather up the world in a happy ganja haze kind of love. I nodded and averted my eyes. I am not a Rastafarian, but I do understand One Love. It's the kind of love that sees a boy whose parents are in the midst of a messy divorce, whose lifelong friend and older brother-figure is dying of AIDS. A boy who dropped out of college because it was just too hard and it made no sense to him. A boy who loved a girl who was maddening and foreign to him. A boy who was trying to be a man and had no idea how. A boy whose heart had been broken by people he loved the most; a boy who needed love. It's the kind of love that sees through the pimples and the pigeon toes and commits to six months of excruciating boredom and squalor because she wants to help this boy.

But people are not puppies or kittens. They cannot be gathered and cared for and fed and then released back into the wilds of their own lives. I mistook my compassion for humanity in general for commitment to this one particular person. For six months he tried so hard to be someone he wasn't, could never be, for me. He hurled himself against the wall of my expectations over and over, always coming up short. Even worse, I degraded him with my loving efforts: I paid his rent, I gave him rides to work when his own car got repossessed, I tried to dress him and feed him and convince him to read. I didn't let him be who he was, find his own way, make his own mistakes because I was so intent on improving him. I am ashamed by the sheer hubris of this notion as I write.

I was young, inexperienced, reeling from my own broken heart. Rather than face my own mess, I went about trying to keep someone else's house. In my effort to hide from myself, I coated my intentions with love, with generosity, with compassion. When he asked me to marry him, I almost threw up. I told him no, that couldn't possibly happen. When he sobbed and said "Where am I supposed to go?" the ornate Emperor's clothing I had constructed fell away. I stood there in my naked cruelty and had no answer for him. He wasn't an intellectual, but even he could see that I had never really loved him. I was in love with the idea of transformation. I was in love with myself. I had been using him for half a year to tell me the things I didn't believe about myself: that I was beautiful, that I was good, that I was lovable, that I was loving. I told myself I was helping him.

I shared this story with a friend who said I made my ex-boyfriend sound pathetic. "I think you should talk more about his good qualities, in more detail. The way you've described him, nobody would want to date or be him." I didn't disagree with this critique. In fact, I spent several hours trying to think of good qualities to balance out the portrait I'd painted. I couldn't think of a single one. Not because they weren't there, but because I had never bothered to see them. I spent six months of my life in a relationship with someone I found repellent, someone I didn't see except for his flaws. I spent six months of my life looking into the mirror his adoration held up for me, admiring nothing but my own warped reflection. I never looked around the jagged edges of myself to see the person who stood before me. No, he was not the pathetic one in our scenario.

He moved across the country after we broke up. I have no idea what happened to him. I haven't thought about him in years. As I remember him now, this half a person I dated but never really knew, I wish him well. I hope he found someone who, unlike me, treated him well. Someone who appreciates him for who he is. I hope that he continued to believe what we used to sing along with Bob Marley: "Every little thing will be all right."