The Devil Comes Dressed as Everything......

....you've ever wanted. 

Soundtrack

She texts me.
It comes as almost less than no surprise.
She asks about us.
About moving.
About giving it a shot.
She asks the things she's asked sporadically over the past two years. 

I think back to our chance meeting and what unfolded in an interminably brief time afterward.
We were both messier, bigger wrecks, somehow in the same place though thousands of miles apart save for the few days our paths crossed and we sat within reach.

A look.
A moment.
Frozen in time.
A memory,  that no matter how deeply I push it down, has not lost much of its intrinsic power.
She is a muse and a muse unlike.....

I push all that away.
I focus on the present.
I'm coming to the point where I need to kick my actual girlfriend loose though she's beginning to ask about moving in together. This tempered whatever emotion and sex and fun has blinded me to. I don't want to live with her. I'm not ready to live with her.
I'm not as committed to the cause as I previously suspected.
She drove too hard a bargain and I'm frankly tired of the emotional rigamarole.
We come from different paradigms.
I believe that the vast majority of a relationship is based in natural compatibility and it shouldn't need work but occasionally.
She operates with the expectation that work is part of the deal and you should expect work and the like within the emotional framework.

It's worn on me. I'm emotionally drained. She's a Bateman. She feeds on the real emotions of others. I take a deep breath and sigh a deep sigh so deep I can scarcely stand up.
That and some other ghosts in her closet that simply are beginning to prove irresolvable in my man brain.

I flash back to my phone and my car and my front seat and my head shaking because I see the lure, I see the temptation of this girl from my past...yet like they say, the devil always comes dressed as everything you've ever wanted.

I flash back to almost exactly two years ago.
The trip.
The chance meeting.
The days that followed.
The rush.
The thrill.
The immediate connection so profound it seemed impossible: two people who didn't think they believed in such things yet somehow realizing....that it was some kind of counterpoint they had found. Some kind of polarity or some other stupid science term...so much alike it will end in a fiery smouldering wreck flying off a cliff in the dark of night....but unable and unwilling to let it go.

I've pushed it so far down for so long...but it remains. Two people...inexorably drawn to one another across time and space and incommunication and life and work and school and everything the modern age tries to toss you way.

Here we are...all efforts aside. All relationships in between.
It's all fallen to the wayside...and here we are...phone in hand(s)....talking with bated breath....debating....fighting the rationality...fighting the expectations...fighting the normalcy....fighting the easy way...and looking at the road less traveled.....two people who don't believe in happy endings cautiously beginning to think, perchance.....something so raw and colossal can be broached and manifest without burning us both to the ground.....