It's So Weird

It’s so weird when someone has kissed your eyelids, has been inside you and looked right into your eyes the whole time, directly, the whole time, never flinching; how someone can have their legs intertwined with yours in your own special, particularly unique leg-tangle that no one else has, knows about, or could ever hope to replicate, and then you run into them in front of the Thai Food buffet line in your work cafeteria, and act as if you are just casual acquaintances, as if not talking or emailing at all for three months and two days is normal, as if this whole thing – this, talking about the Pad Thai, and about the merits and shortcomings of a hot food buffet in a work cafeteria in general –  is not totally, completely, and undeniably, weird.

When I ran into Eli* in front of the Pad Thai, I could have not said anything.  He didn’t see me, I could have backed away quietly.  But I never really can back away with him, it is never really an option.  I always dive right in, and curse myself after, or during even, but it always feels so good – he does – like a drug, that even that bad afterwards coming-down feeling doesn’t really matter.

I was so nervous I couldn’t stop chat-chat-chatting the whole time we were getting our respective, and non-shared, food. 

“I’ve had many good experiences with the hot food line!” I said, assuringly, comfortingly, too enthusiastically, when he expressed concern, pushing a pile of mushy vegetables to and fro, expressed that he doesn’t eat in the cafeteria often, and I remembered how, on our first non-date date, before we were even friends, when he was still married, and happily so I’d assumed, when he was just supposed to be my even-less-than-platonic mentor, an objective advisor, offering stoic, obligatory inspiration, and maybe the occasional sincere, and possibly even heartfelt, encouragement, how he had taken me out to lunch at Bar Americain – he picked the place, I would have never suggested anything that extravagant, and had been thinking of something more along the lines of a quick cup of coffee at Starbucks, or at most, lunch at the work cafeteria – and how I had gazed at him over a three-course meal that had started with my first time ever eating a raw oyster and ended, three hours later, with scraping crumbs from a plate of what had been a stacked peanut butter and chocolate cake dessert, and sipping a cappuccino that I didn’t ever want to finish, and included elaborate entrees and cocktails named Dark and Stormy in between, already starting to fall in love with him, or at least giddily in crush with him, without really even knowing it yet, just knowing that I felt hyper, and super-alert, and buzzing with a pre-attraction that would grow and grow and grow over the next year and a half.