A sea of strangers and random shirts and magic

I walked up to the nearest stranger I could find and asked in hurried poorly worded French for the nearest ticket counter. He smiled warmly and kindly offered up English, ushering me with sweetness from place to place across the busy Gare de lyon train station. We hurried as we talked but somewhere in the midst of the rushing there was just the faintest glimmer of a sparkle. I had all of ten minutes to print my ticket and get on the train leaving from Paris to Bern Switzerland. In typical French fashion, no one would help, but he did, and he was tender in silent ways for mere seconds of my life. I felt like fairy dust wabeing sprinkled on me thru the sunlight shining into this grand French train station. I suddenly noticed his hansomeness as not a mere coincidence, his beard and a scarf just the right thing to soften his smart conservative attire. Kindly allowing me to avoid the slow drudgery of my own French by letting me borrow his as he introduced me to the train attendant and showed him my ticket. I said goodbye as I jumped on the train just moments befor it departed. I wanted to hug him and say lets be friends or maybe even kiss him for sport but instead I just smiled and said thank you. I will never see him again. There were sparkles. I saw them in the sunlight.

We bump into strangers like this, share these moments and then let them go. It happens a million times over the course of a life. 

Weeks ago I shared two passionate nights with an inapropriatelty young frenchman on my island home. We had candelight dinner on the rice fields, we drank red wine on the patio of my villa as the warm tropical night filled with fireflies. We shared sheet wrapped moments of fingers and toes tangled together, of stroking hair and feeling skin. For those two nights I loved him as if he were mine to keep. On the second day, I felt him pulling away, slowly letting go. I dropped him off as he gave me one last twirl of my hair. I squeezed his hand and released him. I knew I would never see him again. My gut ached like fresh heartbreak, like it mattered, like it was real and not the lusty short lived game we were playing. I walked the slow long walk thru the rice fields towards my construction site saying "ouch" oultloud to no one in particular. Letting the sound come out of my mouth like releasing pressure from a baloon. Letting out the ache in slow small grunts. "Ouch, ouch ouch". 

Logic was clearly not at play here. We had little in common, our conversations would not even carry us to the third night that was available before his flight home but was being silently declined. His position as a regional manager of all Parisan outlets of a common American clothing brand gave us little common ground. But there was sparkle, we passed it back and forth between us. But It was not a sparkle I was meant to keep as eventually we would need real topics of conversation and less distance of age to hold us together. The pain in my gut would subside I assured myself. The grass blew in the wind as I walked. I will not see him again. Ever. Ouch.

As a married person with a child you are like a small celestial body. It matters not where in the world you are, they are always in your small orbit, your people. Now I am this solitary vessle with no anchor to steady me I am left to float about. I am becoming comfortable with this idea. This sense that I am carried by the wind bumping into people and exchanging small moments. I am starting to even understand this power. The gift of this. I am starting to see what is possible. 

I now begin to look for these moments. Seek them out like easter eggs in the grass. I sit on this train full of strangers wondering if one of them could light a small spark in me. 

Days ago I imagined the process of searching for people as no different than wading thru piles of used jeans. Trying them on over and over again looking for just the right fit. Like Digging in heaps of broken and ripped and out of fashion pairs at a third world market hoping that somewhere is a pair that hugs all my curves and has just the right pockets and I don't have to bargain too hard to call them mine. This image for too long has left me feeling broken and hopeless, like repunzel being asked to perform the impossible task of spinning straw into gold but lacking the magic to make this happen. This morning as I sat in a perfectly parisian coffee shop eating a chocolate croissant and sipping a cafe au lait I found a small secret that I had until that moment kept from myself. In an instant and for no reason, I let go of this image of used and broken jeans. Without warning a new image floated up and out of my coffee. The image of a grand easter egg hunt. The kind thrown for the royals before it became unfashionable to be ostentatious. A hunt with real rabbits, unimaginably large cakes and women toteing parasols. With each sip of coffee this image grew stronger in my mind and I realised that It is like searching the corners of the earth for just the right kind of magic, this sparkle that only exists between the right combination of people. Something that fills you up and makes you explode. If you know that it is there, if you believe that it is there maybe even a million times over, then it is just a matter of looking for it. It may be partly hidden, and surely unrecognisable if you don't look, but it is there. 

The train rumbles across the track and the green swiss fields roll by. The sun sparkles. I am on a hunt for magic. It can be found. Magic. 

50 dates

He was date number three, this is where I froze. This is where things got stuck for nearly a year. When I started dating for the first time after 17 years of monogomy I set myself the random numerical goal of 50 dates. Being a goal oriented person, this apealed to my sense of achievement. I also decided that this meant I was doing my part to be an active participant in the selection process of a long term mate. A process I had always chided my younger self for abandoning the academic rigor I would otherwise apply to other parts of my life. Much like standing at a shoe store and not trying anything on but complaining that you walked away with the first illfitting and unfashionable pair the clerk handed you, if I wasn't trying men on I had no bussiness complaining about the results.  And so it began. 

I remember my second date when my third suitor accidentally walked in on my dinner. I remember seeing him from a distance, lumbering with large unrooley hair and no attempt at fashion and thinking damn why did I agree to go out with him. I remember leaving my second date abruptly to stand out on the curb and take a phone call from my ex partner. I stood outside the restaurant on the phone reveling in the firmiliarity of his voice. The traffic hummed by and with quiet tears running down my cheeks I blandly admitted I was on a date with no one I cared to see again. I stood still, phone pressed to cheek longing to undo the damage that I had caused, but It was done. 

Despite dismissing date number three from a distance, I ultimately succomb to the unshakable effects of time and procimity and fell in love with him. This  lumbering stranger with big hair became mine for a all too brief a time. But afflicted with an unfortunate fleeing condition he was compelled to continously run off leaving me to my solitude. 

Now I am forced once again to pick up where I left off, the dating, the counting. I may have lost count. I must be nearly half way to my goal by now. 

Most recently there was the spaniard, who propositioned me for quick sex as we sat eating cheap indonesian food in the back of a dark warung. He oozed compliments like a tube of toothpaste with the cap left off. He could have been hansome and charming if clothing, education and context were different. But instead it appeared nothing more than an indecent proposal by a small, lost, unkempt and slightly dusty man. He subjected my last bites of fried rice to a series of rapid fire demands that I provide a valid reason for not letting him take me back to his cot on the floor and show me what a fine spanish lover he was. I had no response worth verbalising. 

Then there was the german, muscular and greying, he was hansome and well apointed. He lacked all experience with women and that combined with him being both german and working as a computer programer in a bank, meant that he gave the illusion that any future encounters would be conducted with the precision and sterility that germans are famous for. Fortunately his shy demeaner prevented any possibility of my needing to interface further with his german engineering. 

Then there was the bearded aussie from melbourne. We had quick banter together and his sweet warm accent was allready a part of something I wanted on account of my most recent love affair. But he was 27 and leaving the next morning. If he would have been braver I would have let him stay. Instead I sent him on his way. "You showed me all the houses but yours" he later texted me with a winking emoticon.

There was the portuguese skinned young canadian who wore his baseball cap backwards and talked of getting his certification in accounting over pizza.  His uncomfortably firmiliar accent only highlighted his inappropriate young age. His genuine sweetness showed in his followup text asking why I had left so quickly after dinner.

There was the 27 year old duchman who despite his guant and overly effeminate appearance seemed well versed in bedding women. He ran his fingers thru my hair as we walked. When I said I was heading home and would not be joining him for the night, his disapointment came to life. He suddenly transformed into a small child fully equipped with arm flaps. He whined of all that we were missing. "But we would have so much fun." He snorted. 

Of course there was the one I chose to bed after several well spaced disipointing dates in which I contemplated wheater a PHD could compensate for illconcieved tattoos. For reasons of lonliness and proximity I tried him on more thouroughly than the rest. The experience was disapointing and sad. I cried in his bed next to his slumbering flesh whose smell did not make me want to nibble it. I cried at all that he wasn't as he lay on his back, mouth open, snoring. 

Mixed in there was the argentinian with long ratty braids who chose the intersection of two streets to start our date which culminated into nothing more than a walk around the block. 

There was a lonely dutchman who claimed online to be sailing around the world but in practice turned out had yet to find a boat. I abruptly and somewhat incoherently walked out on him without so much as finishing my coffee because the agony of his company was more uncomfortable than the solitude I would shortly return to. 

I think that makes eight plus three? Solitary, empty interactions with strangers who I won't see again. This is called dating. I will try and make it to fifty just for sport.  

Of course I am not counting the men in my life who ocassionally stop to ponder if our status as friends has any bussiness being upgraded. 

Sitting too close together on the blanket on this ones land while he surveyed trees and continously invoked with intention the term "we". 

Or the lone solitary dinner that one initiated before reuniting with his ex girlfriend but in practice occurred after the fact. A detail that left us to speculate without words over vietnamese spring rolls slowly dipped in two types of sauce the unknowable possibility of an alternate order of events. 

And of course there is the one who has taken me on as his unpaid personal asisstant as a hopless ploy to spend legal time with me while contemplating wheather my tits and the quality of our banter measure up to his girlfriends pedigree of sweetness.

 

I will count all these men as friends and none will go towards my 50 dates. 

Tonight like most nights I lay alone, i may message the stranger from chile who is leaving too soon to meet me or scold befor un matching the american who only would consider the hour drive to come see me if I could assure him in advance that I would sleep with him.

But in all of this I am alone, left to only count. What do you imagine will happen when I make it to 50? Will I still be alone.