Porcupines

He: It's clear that you like men. But you never keep any of them for very long.
She: Men make women messy.
He: Here's to the fear of being trapped.
(from The Thomas Crown Affair)

She: It's too bad you couldn't have avoided this.
Me: What? Not get involved after he warned me?
She: Yes.
Me: He was just what I wanted.

Sensing a pattern?

Yeah, sure. That don't make it resistible or even something I much want to change at the moment. It serves its purpose. That being to keep me at arms' length. I have my reasons.

But it hurts, you say?

Well, you are talking to a woman whose legs are permanently bruised, scraped, skinned, and sometimes even rug-burned (yes, for that reason).

I have a certain tolerance. Make that resilience. I may not like pain all that much, but I sure do bounce back from it like a Weeble on steroids.

So I'm in that state where I'm drinking espresso at 8:41 pm and stopping in the midst of my 40-mile jaunt to visit a handsome fellow of my previous acquaintance (yes, like that) for a little free-form flirting, just to juice me up again, and then I get back on the bike and ride the rest of the way home dartin' and a swoopin'.

Finish up some work, have a brief bossy little meeting (I was the one being bossy, which is odd for me, but I was still in traffic mode), eat a clementine, blah blah blah. This is how we get on with life, folks, we just get on.

We move, we fly, we get pissed off and decide we deserve better; we recognize that we don't actually want to get too much closer than that and so we scan the horizon for another (un)suitable boy, and there aren't any, so we learn to play bocce ball and win our first-ever game, because, well, we are really quite deft at certain things. Rolling balls in uncertain directions over chalk apparently being one of them.