Stories that Interrupt Themselves

You know how it is, when you meet someone you kind of like and you can't stop smiling, and if he likes you back, he smiles, too, and then it's an endless cycle of slightly goofy grins?

You know how it is when you're getting to know someone you kind of like, and both of your words tumble over each other in endless stories that interrupt themselves and swerve and veer and become new stories, until you've created whole volumes of things you know about each other, but you're never quite sure if you ever did finish that story from before - the one you started that reminded you of spiders, which of course meant you had to tell the story about the spider in the ear, because anything to do with spiders or ears elicits that story when you're in the right mood.

It's like porn. You can't quite define it, but you'll know it when you see it.

And then, like a hard cold lump of concrete that helps you weigh-down the abstract, you go on a date with someone who isn't like that, someone who doesn't smile at you, someone so reserved you can't sweet-talk him into a single story, someone who would stop talking all together if you so much as tried to interrupt him, even for the spider-in-the-ear story, which is delightful in its own creepy way. And then you remember. That's what it's like. It's like everything that this date isn't. That's when you can be secretly proud of yourself for not trying to make one of these somber, intelligent, but deathly dull dates work, even though you just were berating yourself for being too picky. You weren't too picky. You were just the right amount of picky. Wait for it. Please, just wait. It's worth it.