A Lesson Before Valentine's Day...

I trained myself very early on in life to never chase a man...esp if he's not chasing me. No matter how much I wanted to and Lord knows I did, something inside me always whispers "just let em go Sharday". I keep thinking about that scene in "My Bestfriend's Wedding" where Julia Robert's best friend says," Honey if your chasing him and he's chasing her, who's chasing you!" It was like an "AHA" moment and I never wanted to be that girl, constantly running like a fool  for love. Don't get me wrong, I have my issues-I'm a falling fool. I fall easily and deeply too many times BUT if it ends, it ends and I resume to my regular scheduled program. I look at it as it was good while it lasted but its over now and  NOW I  can't let it takeover my mind. After all the drama I've witnessed and experienced I have something to prove to myself, that I must find true happiness inside myself because I was not going to run to the ends of the earth for a man that felt no need to do the same for me. Why waste so much time giving so much love to someone not meant to have it anyway and suddenly that becomes your life, that IS your life. Sometimes I was mistaken as being cold-hearted or that I didn't care which stings a bit because it couldn't be further from the truth. I'll always care more than I'll like to admit but I played tug of war with my emotions, understanding that the heart is deceitful at times, pulling at you to feel something, anything whether those emotions are good or bad. The heart seeks out the passions and disasters, the pleasures and the pains, the wins along with the losses. It's not meant to be your conscious, it only shows you your humanity. The hearts job is to make you feel everything! Essentially my happiness relies on me so whether I'm single or not...it will always exist within me. One day I had to discover love for myself, I had to discover the love of myself. I will never depend on anyone for the sake of my happiness because no one is responsible for my happiness but my own and  frankly that's exactly the way it should be. I love the fact that I can be with someone and without a doubt know it can be over tomorrow and my life won't be any less sweeter or happier. Not to say it  won't hurt because it does, I am human but it won't dictate me at the end of the day, it won't make or break me. I have to realize I'll be okay and understand that a knight in shiny armor might not come and THAT is okay too. Living off the love of someone else is bound to fail because once its gone your link to love is gone because you never made it a priority to allow itself to root in you. The person  you were with  was your source so you chase after it to get it back, you'll do whatever it takes to know it again. You end up doing things you never thought you would do and it still doesn't work and now your depressed, lost because the love you thought was forever wasn't so forever. Lovers will come and go but love is its own separate entity and will remain once everything fades to black so find that and no one will determine your happiness...not even man.

What Love Taste Like...

I spent all day at work today treating time like the friend I never really wanted. I just wanted time on my good side in hopes that he would have pity on me and move expediently faster for the sake of my sanity. Yesterday was Easter Sunday which was a great day by the way but an exhausting one at that so you can imagine Monday morning I felt like I had a hangover. Getting up is the hardest part. I usually set my alarm a good 4 or 5 times, hoping that my brain will at some point register that I'm a young adult who has to face the responsibility of having a job...that I have to be on time for that job.

I woke up this morning with the greatest desire to be a kid again. But then again, as a kid we had school, so since childhood we've been conditioned and trained to get up early so why in the hell is it still sooooo hard to get up in the morning. Oh I know why, because I was working until midnight the night before, which as a kid...that wouldn't have happened. Lights were out before nine. I also woke up bright and early to clean the house in preparation for dinner that evening...if I was a kid, moms would have taken care of that. Went to church by 11am and got out around 2:30pm. If I was a kid, I would have fallen asleep in church and been well rested by the time I got home. Had dinner around 4pm with great people and headed to the movies for a late showing. We get older and there's so much more that seems to be going on, the earth is just a spinning top and your left with this dizzy vomiting feeling after looking at it too long. So today I had done what all of us do...simply wanting the earth, time...whatever it is to just stop moving for a second. Push pause so I could just sleep. To indulge in the silence, the halting of time. Unfortunately this too much to ask because 6:30 am quickly find 7:30 am.

Work is bearable but I'm barrelling through it, literally. In a way, those people have no clue who I am because I treat work like a second life. I don't confuse my work life with my outside life. Many of them are clueless to this goofy silly, completely absurd person I am. I almost don't know why I hide who I am to them. But over the years I've come to be more protected over myself and who I show all of me to. I guess the crazier and outlandish I am to you is me trusting you. There are very few people I can honestly say have seen all my layers...and there are a lot of layers. I've almost become complacent with the friends I have so much so, I can see myself retreating from meeting new people and getting to them and vice versa. I don't like that though...

Finally its 6pm, and I might as well have been a gust of wind out the doors I was so ready to leave. I'm walking to the bus stop and I see this Indian guy and I'm wondering if he was the same guy I saw a couple days ago or a week ago...idk, when your not really paying attention but paying some sort attention to bits and pieces its like you get an idea of the puzzle but you just can't form a complete picture to the puzzle. I have no idea why I care about this Indian guy, maybe its the way he looks at me and I'm curious to know what he's thinking. I wonder if he was thinking if I'm the same girl he saw a couple days ago or a week ago.

I dig in my purse to crab a mini-sized york peppermint patty. I had a whole bag full. Wendy got them for me because I like minty candy...and ice cream. We have that in common, I think she tossed them in my room yesterday and I absentmindedly threw them in my bag this morning knowing I wasn't going to have time to pack a lunch...I never do but every night I assume I will. Has yet to happen. I'm at the bus stop and its rainy and gloomy but I take a bite into this york peppermint patty and for some reason this york peppermint patty has ignited this theory that this is what love must feel like....like biting and eating a york peppermint patty.

The taste was fresh, sweet, quick, hard, soft, strong. As I'm writing this, it truly sounds like a bad corny commercial but it was very enlightening lol. I just thought, I want to love like this; experience something immediate.... feel the quickness of love rushing into me as soon as I set my eyes on them. A knowing that this is going be something great. Seriously, have you ever tasted a york peppermint patty, you feel like you just ate the freshest piece of ice from a sacred everglade or something. There's this breathtaking kind of aftertaste your mouth gets from eating a york peppermint patty and its like you took a bite out of the most clean fresh sweet and minty thing that ever existed. Like something pure and untainted. I'm not crazy...I'm just saying...to love, like God loved an undiscovered land when he painted it with snow, ice, water (hence the taste of a york peppermint patty), It would all make sense why love was created in the first place.

By the last bite, I was pondering the question. What if he was the one? What if it was happening now. What if right here and right now, we tasted like this peppermint patty I was eating now? What kind of life would we lead as a black woman and an Indian man? Would I get married in India and have a traditional wedding with beads and bright colors? I was suddenly curious. A part of me wished it was now, finally but a part of me was relieved that it wasn't. That in actuality this man only stood out to me because he was the only one there...I wasn't in awe of him or his looks. He was just a guy and I a girl but I couldn't help wondering...it could of been him. We could have fell in love right there...but we didn't and then the bus came and let me on first.

Ummm this is the best I could do lol but I'm kinda proud of myself!

We both got off the same stop. Weird. Then we proceeded to get on the next bus together..he let me get on first. I sat down but the bus was practically full so he stood with his laptop like a fine piece of Indian china awkwardly on display in a African museum. Somewhere in it all, I became distracted by the other faces and outside the window as I usually do when I looked up and he was gone. I was on 87th and Cottage Grove and it was like he evaporated....like he was never there. Maybe he was just the illusion, the illustration I needed to understand the significance of love while eating my peppermint patty. Whatever it was, he was gone now and just like that, he was gone from my mind and my thoughts.