Feast or Famine

There aren't a lot of gray zones in my life.

Somehow, I've gotten this far in life on a diet of binging and purging.

It's either feast or famine with my career, my daily routine, and whatever romance I can drum up.

I'm either in an executive-level, high-paying job, or I've got nothing going on at all.

I'm either driving 200 miles in five hours from Oxnard to Pomona, or I can't get out of bed.

I either can't get a date, or I'm joking marriage with the guy I've seen three times in five days.

In this past week, for the first time since January, I found someone in LA that I liked and wanted to be with. For the first time since moving here more than three years ago, I felt liked by someone who was willing, able, and actually available.

And then, without warning, he can't seem to find the time to make a plan with me.

It's OK. I can take a hint. I was afraid of overdoing it, burning out, too much too soon, and saw this coming. I know I should've said no. But I just couldn't resist the whirlwind he swept me up in. I took as much as I could get and ran with it. 

It was like I found some fireworks, and I decided to set them off all at once.

See, I'd just grown accustomed to the idea that my time had passed, that it was over for me, that it just wasn't going to happen. And then I got just the slightest taste – a minuscule amount, less than a sliver – of how it could be.

Even though it didn't last longer than the burning of a match, it showed me that I'm not too old, too damaged, too heartbroken, too fat, too weird. I could love again. But I don't want to bother with the grayness of dating. It's so exhausting. Can't I just skip right to the love? The ecstasy? The rapture? The comfort and familiarity?

Can't I just pick a person who also picks me and we just decide to go do that together?

Do we have to dance around it?

Time's a wastin'. I don't have forever anymore. My life is half over.

Maybe this is the life of a manic depressive, or a bulimic, or an addict. I've never been diagnosed with any of those conditions, but I do seem to experience only peaks and valleys – the highest heights of the rollercoaster, and its steepest plummets, but none of the moderate loop-de-loops or gentle banking turns in between.

And the one thing I've learned is that whichever extreme has me in its clutches at the time, it can change, just like *that* ::snaps fingers::.

Related Posts:
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Or, The Cassandra Complex
This Addictive Life