I Felt Your Heart Breaking From Way Over There, another short train of thought story Options

[Lindstrom]

Like the last one, told in 2nd person, only this time it focuses on a girl. It's much shorter and entirely thought oriented, with no dialogue or anything, almost a monologue. I spent about an hour and a half writing this up. Hope it entertains somebody.



Your friend told you about some friend of hers, and she's trying to set you up. It's December, and finals are coming up, your shopping hasn't been started, and you've got the sniffles intermittently. Anyway she goes on about the guy and shows you his picture on facebook.com, which is surprisingly well taken, but it is the only picture. She talks him up and plans a day for everyone to hang out and meet so you can get to know him and everything will fall into place. She mentions he's your type. He's rather handsome, so you agree. You begin to put away your homework and bust out the calendar to see how many days are left before break, and-

Hey, this is great! No wait, this sucks. You are torn between a number of issues that immediately occurred to you, the first of which being you've been set up to spend an undisclosed amount of time with a complete stranger, who, while probably charming, you found out about through the internet. The first two things your brain naturally associates with the internet are 1) thievery and 2) pornography, leading to the possibility that he is secretly a thieving pornographer, or a pornographic thief. Assuming there is a chance he is neither, you deduce there are 3 possibilities, and make a mental pie chart indicating the odds that he is actually a nice person. Because you are not a statistician, your chart declares he has an even chance of being one of these three, which might not be truthful but doesn't matter because odds are a guy you don't know is likely to be no good. It also occurred to you that you just made a pie chart, which are dumb, for a 1/3 possibility scenario, when you hate math and in picking your college major relinquished ever having to really do any math that didn't involve bills, groceries, or taxes. You just did math, over a guy who has a nice eyes (however behind those eyes may lie a dishonest pervert), instead of your homework.

To be fair, your homework isn't due til the end of the week and it's easy enough anyway. What's more important right now is the validity of the genuine. It would probably be easier to consult your friend. Yes, naturally she'd know enough about this person. She said he was your type! You love your type! Everything is awesome again. But all of a sudden, you overhear the TV from the other room, where some character calls another character a bitch. Bitch! What a word for right now, because maybe your friend is secretly out for herself. You quickly dismiss this because years of friendship count for more than a single out-of-context word from the TV. While it's logical that yes, something terrible might be afoot, you've remembered the years of having a bathroom next to your older sister's room where the TV would remain on during her sleep, so that when you went to the bathroom at night you could usually hear the infomercials for Nordic Tracks and such. This confirms your intuition, that your friend is right and TV was designed to feed you mostly bullshit. Freud would probably attribute this to some part of the brain that rationalizes based on prior experience or something. Yes, I believe science is at hand here. This puts you at ease.

A problem still looms over your head like one of those green flies in summertime at the beach. You've been thinking about this for what may have seemed like only a few minutes, but was actually several hours. Holy crap! You wash your face, brush your teeth, do your business, hop into your blue jammies, and plop into bed. However, you won't be getting to sleep because of the unanswered questions. You make a list, but because it is, like the pie chart, mental, you can't bullet it or revise it or anything. Here goes! -Nice guy/Pornographer/Thief?; -Is he really my type?; -Do I want to meet him?

That last one ended your list because you didn't put much thought into it before. Your list is gone! It's okay though, you won't really need it. Question three from the long-gone list, in its complexity and multitude of variables, leads to deeper thought. It's almost like you're going to make another list, but instead you should probably focus right now. Lists are distracting and you don't even have anything written down. Alright, let's get back on track here. You begin to lay out the variety of paths you would be going down upon meeting him. You'll either like him and be friends, be attracted to him and maybe make some sort of move... no, he'll make the move. You're not going to make the move, gotta seem too cool or something. Right? Is that it? No wait, that's not it. But anyway he'll probably know he has to make the move cuz guys are brought up knowing they have to make the move probably. Making the move is no longer a concern for you. What else do we got here? Oh yeah, you could always find out he sucks and you never have to see him again. That would be totally fine, except it would be disappointing finding out that, after all this thought you've put into it that it was, as you had dreaded, a waste of time. Then it hits you.

What you need is a genie! Not just any genie, but the genie from Disney's Aladdin. This is critical. I don't think I have to explain it but I will anyway. Aladdin's Genie, voiced by Robin Williams, was super nice and helpful, carefully explaining the rules and even saved his master's life. He even threw in that freebie to get him out of the cave. What a guy! But other genies, they're assholes. They know exactly what you wanted but they can't let it slide. No, they gotta teach you a lesson or something. I think there was an X-Files episode all about it, but I didn't see it. Anyway the point is the odds of you acquiring Aladdin's lamp seem extremely futile, especially considering at the end of the movie he uses his last wish to grant the genie freedom. The genie plan is scrapped immediately.

Hey, do you want a boyfriend right now? I don't mean right now, but I mean, if things kick off and you start dating this guy, you'll be attached, right? He'll call you a lot, or you'll call him a lot, or maybe even too much, and he'll say dumb stuff, and maybe he'll be bragging to other guys. Wait, before you get ahead of yourself, you should remember you haven't met this guy and he might be quite the gentleman. Yes, up until the part where you meet him you will likely only know things about him mentioned to you in simple sentences. It would be rude to not give him a chance, especially since you already agreed to meet him. It's important there are some ground rules, though. First of all, school comes first. You don't even know where he goes to school, if at all, but the thousands of dollars spent on your tuition, books, housing, food, and so on should probably not get wasted because some guy you met doesn't know how to handle a relationship. On the flip side, you should probably be mentally and emotionally prepared too. Of course, that's really what all of your thinking since you last talked to your friend has been.

It occurs to you that, were he open-minded, you could have a relationship unlike other people. It wouldn't be built on needing to see someone, but rather what works, him showing up when it's reasonable and you the same. Calling would probably work just like that too. Does this make sense? The more you think about it, it occurs to you how other people in relationships tend to keep it going on a basis of desire. It's like a campfire, made strong and interesting at first, not by need but by fascination, but after time it steadily grows weaker, is less important, and is kept alive merely by adding wood. Sexual correlations pop into your mind but euphemisms aren't really all that funny these days so even if there was someone here to make a joke to you wouldn't bother. Anyway this quickly organizes your thoughts. A guy would not be worth dating unless he were thoughtful enough to give you space when you need it, but be there when you ask for him. He would have to understand the way your mind works and what he doesn't understand about you he must be willing to figure out. Classically, the purpose of dating is to find someone whom with you can share a deep bond on a variety of levels, creating fulfillment in many ways. It would only be a waste of time to get involved with someone who you could never deeply bond with.

Does it seem like you're holding out for the perfect man? Some would say the perfect husband, as if marriage was a critical aspect to relationships. Truly, you could be happy with someone as long as they were with you regardless of whether or not a priest said you were supposed to be with them til one of you dies. Unconditional love, the stuff you were raised believing in, stands atop a platform like an Olympic champion in your brain. It wins because it heralds the truth, beauty, and boundlessness of a relationship where any worries will be dashed away with a tag team of logic and real admiration. Keeping faith in love strong in your heart, you realize you're actually capable of feeling this special kind of love, and with that you fall asleep effortlessly.

END