Sober Goggles

We shake hands and I hold her gaze. She smiles but not shyly the way I like. She doesn't do the downward glance that suggest she's sexually submissive.
She has glass clear blue eyes but her mascara is too heavy. It's as black as her hair which I should like, and she has a nice little midriff and one of those flowing dresses that show you just enough to see if the ass is firm, but I see the nervous eyes once we break gaze and she's the type that has to always search the room for the next crack rock of male validation. She loves often and she looks superficially from the crack pipe of infatuation if even that.
I doubt she's even good at short term game but rather something more akin to quarter game, perhaps some Tequila shots and a Tapas or whatever-the-fuck-passes for bullshit dates these days of modernity if you know the type.

Her friend is less hot but clearly less whorish but neither are pretty enough for your humble narrator and I settle into my food and flirt with a longtime friend and acquaintance.

I post up elsewhere and overlook what passes for downtown here and there's people and it's warm and my need to be social and the like has passed. I soak it in and consider the options before and whether or not I'll pursue anything on the side in addition to my girl but I realize that I don't have to decide at this moment.
So I let it go.
---

I was supposed to meet with my sponsor in the afternoon but I just didn't go.
I'm not feeling the program but I also don't desire the drink and all the ensuing problems it will bring so I'm left traipsing through the world, traversing it on steady feet only to find the world is less certain than I had once believed.

The first girl I dated after my separation began hits me up out of nowhere.
There's still this connection between us.
It is deafening when we text and though we are each seeing someone, it does little if nothing to mitigate the depth of what lies between us. I can tell she's comfortable with him, but she is not in love with him. The temporary nature of what we shared, so intense, so strong, so dangerous, has made it permanent to us in recollection.

I have this semi-certain notion that our paths will cross again and we'll share 3 days of intensity and we will go back to our lives, slightly ruffled and slip back on the coats of our regular lives.
We will pick back up exactly where we left off and it will be good in the short hours it lasts and....I let this narrative slip from my mind and appreciate the warm air.
A girl whom I've known for years hits me up and she's going through a divorce and she wants to hang out because we've always had a calmness between us and she knows I understand what she's going through but I know her and I know what else she wants and I don't commit to plans because all of this is getting tough to process and I wonder who my girl is eating dinner with and how many dudes have hit on her and I could completely flip out but I don't and I put on a smile and laugh at my friend's joke and a girl stares me down and her group wants to recruit some guys to entertain them for the evening but I'm done being entertained and entertaining and I simply want to sleep in my bed and I know my days off from the gym are always listless and restless.

I accept this ennui will pass and give way to something....other than this.
I bid fond farewell, put my feet to pavement and head home to sleep.