Here We Go Again

The night after K and I broke up, I went out for a drink with friends.

They came over to indulge me--to play some poker and to make sure I wasn't about to gauge out my eyes with something sharp. I needed them. They stopped me from being overwhelmed by the oppressive freedom of filling the hours any way I chose.

And as we chatted over cocktails in the cement basement of a local bar, I remarked to one that I would have to start cultivating my crushes instead of ignoring them.

"Do you have a crush?" he asked, amused.

I did. A silly, adolescent, heart-palpitating, stomach-churning crush that snuck up on me from the middle of nowhere and took root before I even knew what was happening. It was absurd. It was rebounding at its finest. It made no sense whatsoever. True to my word, I cultivated it.

It worked.

And now what do I do? As silly as I was before, I suddenly find myself having real feelings--strong feelings, feelings that make me gasp--feelings that make me sigh in spite of myself like a character in the kind of romance novel we used to buy in college to read to each other in front of ski lodge fires while we drank more than anyone would consider strictly necessary.

Am I in any position to do this again so soon? Or is whatever it is not even close to being the beginning of anything worth talking about? Am I just naive enough to think that there's something there when there's nothing more than hormones and too much beer? Can my worn-out nerves handle it if there is? Where to begin? Where to go? How to make it work?

And then there's K. As much as I know that I did the right thing for both of us, I can no longer deny how much of my heart I left behind with him. When I see him, I feel all the comfort that our years together have made second nature to both of us--and none of the annoyance that made me leave.

And I don't know what to do. With any of it.