More Reasons to Love My Kitty

Sigh. Rainy day. No bike ride. Lots of walking around in wet trousers. A blood test. A visit to the physical therapist's office, which is nice and has jazz playing in it but still involves being poked in the most painful spot on my butt.

My mom is getting me a massage for my birthday, and I am not sure whether to look forward to being kneaded into a more relaxed shape, or to fear the pain it may involve.

I am sick at heart lately, I'll admit. Nothing terminal, and nothing really unusual, but it does make me awfully weepy when a fairly good romantic movie comes on TV. And it makes me not have the energy, sometimes, to talk to friends who call all bouncy (Annabelle likes rainy days; more power to her) and just want to chat, like friends do.

I know what the trouble is, sort of, but there is nothing to be done about it at the moment. I have an awful lot of shit in front of me, and I have to just keep plowing at it. And that isn't even the worst of it.

I remember feeling this way, a long time ago, and I thought I might have grown out of it somehow. Well, I have grown out of some of it, actually. I no longer feel incomplete as a single human, and I sure don't feel any desire to get married or "settle" or go through any other of those proscribed motions.

But unfortunately I seem to have retained the ability to be lonely. Not even garden-variety lonely, but to feel longing. And of a peculiarly annoying sort - it's not attached to anybody in particular, and it's not attached even to a specific vision of a somebody.

I don't know that I'd want a boyfriend if I were offered one. I just know that not being offered one is not doing me any good, either.

I was talking to a friend some time ago, about her mother, and how she'd never quite found anyone who was right for her. It's a variation on the theme that's the black-hole center of virtually every single-girl movie and TV show ever made, but the end of that, always, even in the supposedly singles-positive world of Carrie and the girls (though I'd argue that it's absolutely not singles- positive), is that the girl's "problem" is solved by meeting The Right Guy.

It may well be that it just doesn't work that way in real life, and maybe what I am feeling is step A of coming to terms with that. Maybe that's what my hesitation to even wish for a boyfriend is about. Maybe I am starting to recognize that any romantic relationship is always going to fall short, or that I want a degree of autonomy and freedom that is only achievable when one isn't paired off like one of Noah's monkeys.

Maybe it's because I've realized that my soulmate may well be that bicycle hanging on my wall. He's damn sexy, that's for sure.