Distress

So...

I went shopping this morning. 

Shoes....those things that soothe the heart of lonely old ladies. 

I wanted a sexy red sundress but could only find a cougar patterened one.  I bought the kitty one and I know, I'll hear a bunch of crude comments about that.

I'm only a Cougar because I attended Washington State. 

Geesh...

While out and about, I noticed that I had a couple of older guys staring at me. 

Older.....

actually, they were my age. 

One wore a leather jacket, had a bright yellow mustang and that guitar-player look on his face. 

He was cute..... but not what I want.  I took off my leather coat and hid my keychain, so he didn't see the guitar shaped trinkets on them. 

He stood behind me in line at the store. 

He was parked next to me at the mall. 

Thank goodness I drive a mini-van....I can always pretend to be calling kids on the cell phone to get out of bizarre confrontations with members of the opposite sex. 

I don't think it would have mattered to this guy.  I made some excuse to leave and skipped off wondering what the heck was wrong with me. 

I know what I want. 

I know who I want. 

I can't find a spell that will break the freakin' spell he has over me. 

What to do....

What to do...

I DO love other men.  They are my friends.  They've been my friends for years but I've never so much as pecked their cheeks.  I've hugged them.  I've given them money and set them up on dates.  I've gone to their weddings and held their hands during their divorces. 

I love them but...they're not what I want. 

I'm broken. 
Somebody ruined me. 

In graduate school, a psychology professor took me aside and told me that I have this "puppy dog quality" that is incredibly attractive.  He said, I had the aura of someone that just lost her best friend. 

I didn't tell him anything. 

He told me that he married his best friend but lost her to cancer five years earlier. 

A little bit of projection on his part, yet...we spoke about first love. 

The oxytocin, the brain chemical cocktails, the brain imprints and the way that stupid relationship sets up expectations that no one else will ever meet. 

The Creator knew how to keep people together.  We get encoded into each other's biochemical dna.  Unfortunately, the world doesn't cooperate with the design of the creator.   

Yes, I know. 

If only I would have NOT considered running off to college to be a stupid music instructor.  In the end, I didn't go.  I didn't want to leave my sister alone in the city while partying so far away. 

I guess we were not meant to be. 

I should've told him that I planned on staying but...he left me.  I didn't realize he left so I could go to college until I found his note 20 years later.  I thought he got laid by a hotter chick and broadened his horizions.   

Hey...I'm always trying to look on the bright side of things. 


People always thought we were brother and sister, which was a bit awkward when embracing in public. 

The really weird part is that he looks like me.  We have the same face, the same hair, our eyes are the same shape.  His are blue.  Mine are green.  We have the same eyeglasses .  We wear similiar clothes and shoes.  The truth is that if I never spilled water on myself or wore too much talcum so that I had to change my clothes, we would have wore the exact same outfits the last three times we met. 

It's a little freaky. 

He's looks just like me except he has nicer skin...and hair...he has a real beard....and more brain cells.

I've got a lot more fat...but the fun kind of fat. 

Other than that our resemblence is uncanny.   

As I struggle to watch my eldest get destroyed by her first love only to go back to him, I return to wonder about mine. 

I research the latest work.  There are new researchers out there doing qualitative studies on the phenomenon of first love. 

My favorite line from a researcher was that to secure a lifetime of happiness, to never long or miss another, one must AVOID THE EXPERIENCE OF FIRST LOVE.   The person further went on to write that people never recover from first love and that the intensity of the feelings shared within that experience causes future relationships to fail. 

That made me chuckle. 

Stupidity makes future relationships fail.   First love has nothing to do with it. 

Unless one's husband gets jealous because he's nosing around and finds love letters his wife thought she threw away in 1987.  My husband was pretending to be cool towards me for years.  We slept apart.  He called me his ex. 

Truth is, when my first love came back to visit, my husband was incredibly jealous. 

I'm confused.  He can hate me but no one else can love me. 

Men are funny. 

I wonder about my first love.   

I wonder why he came back and what he needed to know. 

It probably has to do with the reason I have a daughter in her early twenties. 

He probably fed into the gossip that suggested things that I hope he never heard.

I'll have to clear that one up. 

I don't want to tell him. 
I shouldn't have to tell him anything.  He can do basic math.  The gossips in my family can't. 

It's not his problem. 
Why am I fixating on my first love? 

I ponder that...
I think God gave me this fixation on this person to keep me from becoming a slut.  Men grab my a$$, offer to save me and all I can think about is....

HIM

and that the men grabbing at me are not what I want.

Still....what the hell am I doing? 

There are so many nice men around me. 

Some have offered to help me get this house sold.  Others have offered me a place to stay.  One offered me a job. 

I don't want to take advantage of their hospitality. 

I don't want them and I don't want them to think that I want them. 

Why?

I rationalize that I miss my friend because there was a lesson he needed to teach me. 

Can't fathom what the lesson is. 

I rationalize that I miss my friend because he makes me feel young. 

Not really....the old geezer with the yellow Mustang makes me feel young. 

Maybe I just want to be some one's best friend. 

That's probably it. 

The man in the basement says he wants me to stay here because I'm his best friend.  I asked him to elaborate.  He claims he can tell me anything. 

Okay, then....why didn't he tell me he emptied the bank account into his 401K and stopped paying the joint credit cards? 

I didn't get an answer. 

I think that the problem is that my first love set an impossible benchmark for other men to meet.  I want to be with my best friend.  I will only have sex with my best friend. 

No best friend and I'm climbing the freakin' walls. 

I can't even pretend to do it with the guy in the basement. 

That sex thing....sex with a 500+ pound man.....well, I'm still shocked about that. 

I had no clue. 

That's what I get for living like a nun for so damn long.  I didn't notice because I never saw it. 

In asking other therapists, someone told me that every 35 pounds a guy gains in weight leads to a 1" reduction in member size.  So, if one were very well endowed and put on an additional 350 pounds, it would explain why there seems to be nothing there now. 

His big 10" is now well hidden.

Truth is, I don't know how big he was.  I never cared. 

Actually, he's always been a little on the heavy side, so I have no clue how endowed he really was.  I figured that if he loved me, my mind would assume that he was around 10" and if he was mean to me he would seem to be about 2".  

I guess that is not an 'in my head' assumption.  The meaner he is to me, the more he eats and the smaller he is. 

Wow... The things I'm learning are shocking the hell out of me. 

I don't know what is wrong with me. 

I think this is why I stay here. 

There is nothing out there that I can have that I really want. 

But staying here is destroying my financial security. 

I'm going to have to bite the bullet and get a lawyer. 

One of the guys I interviewed is cute...so I can't hire him. 

Damn...

Love,

S.

P.S.  I'll try hypnotizing myself again.  If I can find one tiny reason to hate him....just one...I can turn my lusty feelings into disgust. 

Do I want to do that? 

If I succeed, I could patent the process....

there may be a market for that.

Well...maybe not. 

If he disgusted me, I'd need him even more. 

I'd have to take him out for dessert all the time so that he can teach me willpower. 

Yep...

I couldn't eat chocolate if I felt disgusted. 

He'd have to go with me to the bar so I couldn't get tipsy. 

Or to those Chinese Food Buffets where the sesame tofu is deep fat fried and I tend to leave weighing twice as much as I did coming in. 

You know something? 

I've already got someone who can do that for me.

He lives in the basement.

But, it would be cruel to sit with him at a Cheesecake factory, wouldn't it? 

Sigh...

I give up. 

I'm middle aged and half-dead. 

If I can make it this long, the other forty years should be a breeze.

Edit (8:19 p.m.)

Well, I just learned that the man in the basement took 10K from his 401K last year and we had to pay taxes on it.  He used my business losses to cover it (and then blamed my business losses for our low tax refund).

He never told me the truth. 

I'm getting tired and worried. 

I can't share assets with this man...I'm liable for his financial misteps. 

Damn...

Pray for me.