After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
~Phillip Pullman

I’m home again today with sick kids – Ollie and Thomas this time. It’s stressful to see your kids sick -, their active selves reduced to lethargic, fever-y versions that are hard to recognize behind the glassy eyed stare. I am a Mum, therefore I worry. 

I had been hoping to go on an adventure this weekend, but with all the missing of work, it looks like I’ll be working for the weekend, and not in a Loverboy way. 

I was talking with Ginny the other night (the two of us can gab forever), I hadn’t spoken to her about Darth in a while, so I caught her up (mostly). She was the only person I had not told that he was married (though I thought, and told everyone, that he was in an open marriage, so it was all good – sheah…). So we talked boys. 

Remember that guy I mentioned who asked me out? Well he called the other night for “business”, and during that call he was asking me what my weekends looked like. As I rattled through the entire month of February, I realized every single weekend is packed with stuff. There is a pause after I finish filling him in on my schedule.

“How are you ever going to find a man?”

*insert a gobsmacked pause here* 

I wanted to say, “Does a fish need a bicycle?”, but I laughed instead. Because that is fucking funny. I didn’t go into the whole “my-heart-is-buried-in-salted-earth” thing, but instead said, “You know, I don’t even officially have my divorce papers yet. I am just learning to get my feet under myself, I have big goals of getting financially free of my ex and I need to focus on that.” I thought about the nice guy I met on the plane at Christmas time and what he said to me about meeting people, “If it happens, it happens.”

The guy on the plane… rock-a-billy cool, funny (at one point I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes), interesting (really cool job and business owner) and good conversation. We were talking about meeting people, dating, finding someone at our age, he smiled at me and said, “You have no trouble meeting people.”

I had started the conversation  he was in the middle seat, between me (by the window) and a kid (in the isle seat). I said, “I guess you got the short straw today.” and we both laughed. We had talked the entire 4 hour flight, and I had been up the whole night before, expecting to catch up on sleep during the flight. And you know what? Not an ounce of physical attraction on my part. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Really universe? You fucking suck. He gave me his cell number, said if I was every in the city we could go swing dancing, hang out. He sent me a couple of texts, and I replied, but my heart isn’t in it AT ALL. And I will never lead someone on, I know how awful that feels. 

On that trip at Christmas there is another boy story. Actually there are three. I’m skipping over number 2 – Darth.  

One my way home there was a giant cluster fuck with Air Canada. The plane was downsized and it left a bunch of us stranded. And without getting into all the insanity of everything that happened, about 10 of us (out of the 50) decided to run from plane to plane to see if we could squeak on any of the already full flights standby. One of the 9 others was this man… I was *immediately* attracted to him. Oh dear god, like I haven’t felt for anyone except Darth. He was tall, fit, well dressed, just that casual but not overly quaffed look that had me in insta-swoon. I wanted to touch his hair. He was interesting looking. I could not stop staring at him. And we did that dorky, look at each other and look away thing. Everytime we made eye contact, I thought “Busted!”. I would try to position myself so I could watch him, but he couldn’t see me. It was ridiculous. But felt *wonderful!*. The flight before I finally caught the last plane out of Toronto that night, he caught his – it was a stop over, dropping off in Vancouver before heading on to Australia. We were standing beside each other. 

“We could just keep going right on to Australia?” He said to me. 

“I would love that.” I said smiling back at him. 

And then he was gone. I haven’t felt that way since.

Well, Darth doesn’t count. As I said to him once, “My desire/need/lust for you is road side attraction deep. Those never ending holes? Yeah, like that." 

I’m still hammering away at book one, a story I need to tell. But I’m already writing book two in my head (and occasionally here). Again, these may just sit in my documents, and my grandkids and great-grandkids will get to read about what a foul mouthed, romantic-fool, slut I am, but they will be written. My fantasies of sitting on Oprah’s couch seriously silly, but fun to imagine. I am enjoying the process, the inward thinking about those times… how far I have come in the last 3 years – how I have changed my life. I hope other people find it as interesting reading about it, as I did living it. 

Or my grandkids do, anyway.