Problem Worst Help Show

After an incredible weekend I'm drinking and feeling blue, which is only to be expected. My mood swings are predictable if nothing else. Tonight's blues theme: female intuition.

Watched The Love Letter, which reminds me why I don't have TV. An entire population, gripped by the power of a letter. Like most women I too want a love letter. I want someone to take the time to draft and re-draft, to crumple and discard, to stare off into space struggling to express the (hopefully) inexpressible.

And instead of finding myself a poet or a journalist or a novelist, I instead consistently fall for the strong silent type. The incredibly silent type. The kind who has trouble with simple dinner conversation, who has trouble finding words for everyday situations, the kind who accidentally insults people with an innocent suggestion. Men who don't understand and avoid poetry, and who sometimes avoid me because I'm gazing at a moon seeing romance when all they're seeing is that it's hard to freaking see in the dark.

When I was in college I didn't understand this inclination, this need for for the non-talker. I finally rationalized it away, saying opposites attract, and (lately) that I was learning to speak a new language. One built of actions and gestures instead of words. A language defined by its very ambiguity, by the silent freedom to mean whatever we needed it to mean at that moment in time. I had opened the primer for a language without stress, without accents, without anything to read between the lines. The Zen language of love.

Until I made the worst mistake of my life and told him how I felt. Until I broke the silence with (of all the stupid things) a poem. Reality came crashing down around my ears, his hands silently tapping out that he doesn't care for me.

No hidden language, no unexpressed bond, no desire for anything deeper. The moonlit ocean I thought was in front of us was actually a mud puddle. Shallow and superficial, and not of much importance to him at all. I would imagine he was thinking of me, when he was in fact thinking of 60 Minutes.

I was reading between the line, all right. Reading stuff that wasn't even there. Trusting my heart, opening it based on a few flimsy pseudo-deductions. Following my instinct down a path of faulty conclusions, miscommunication, and false hopes.

And that's the problem. How can I ever trust myself again, after failing so badly? I thought I was safe, I thought we both knew what was going on, and I sent that stupid poem only to find out I mean less to him than the sports announcer on the ten o'clock news.

How could I have thought that was love? How could I have made that mistake? And what if I make it again, with someone less honorable, someone who takes advantage of me and hurts me more than I've managed to hurt myself this time?

And if I'm wrong about something as important as love, then what else am I wrong about? What other mistakes am I making? What are my friends not telling me? And are they even my friends? Is the paint on my living room wall really was amazing as I think it is? Am I any good with words at all? If I can't talk him into trusting me then I'm not good enough, am I?

I'd like to think the solution would be to just date the wordy. Date a person as immersed in verbal as I am, find someone else who blogs nonsense and then deletes it. But how could I trust that person, knowing personally how easy it is to tell people what they want to hear, and how difficult to tell them what you need them to know? I'd be playing a player who was playing me. And neither of us would watch our mouths, because words are easy. Easy to hurt someone with, easy to use when you need to make up. Easy to shape to your bidding. I'm afraid we would use words when we shouldn't, that we would be blinded by our verbal fireworks, and that amid all that babble we wouldn't know when to take each other seriously.

So I'm stuck. I can't trust myself, can't risk loving the silent, and can't dare to love the talkative.

I don't know which way to jump.