Fourth Runner-Up, Cinderella Story

This is an essay I wrote a few years ago about my last girlfriend.

I wanted to fall in love with you. I wanted to fall in love with you so that I could stop looking, could stop hoping, could finally stop wondering if the woman I was destined to spend the rest of my life with had been the delivery driver climbing into her truck outside my apartment building, the middle manager who had been working on her laptop at the coffeehouse, or the drugstore clerk who had rung up my tampons. Was this thus far elusive woman the stranger I had met at a party whom I had decided I could eventually find attractive or her laugh not quite as annoying before I was inevitably introduced to her partner? I wanted you to be my forever and only because I had not garnered enough good karma to be pardoned from slogging through personal ads and dates rife with uncomfortable silence before being granted a pass into the magical and everlasting land of matrimony.

The plan was to suspend ourselves comfortably between bliss and domesticity. We’d balance the mundane reality of grocery store trips and oil changes with hushed personal phone calls from our cubicles at work and romantic weekend getaways. I figured if we spent enough time side by side, holding hands, trading back massages and quips about our respective coworkers that we would find ourselves in love, the way I would find your hand stroking my hair while I lay with my head in your lap. Our love wouldn’t be surprise or sudden. It would creep in like fall putting on her colors and I would find myself thinking about you more and more, remembering the first time you came to my apartment and stopped at the grocery to buy me flowers. I would suspend myself in the memory of your hands in the darkness of my bedroom, your voice low and urgent in my ear, while a dusting of pink slowly rose above my collar.

I didn’t get the chance to feel butterflies in my stomach when I realized like had become something more. I wanted to be able to say I love you so I could save the words for a nondescript morning when we, hazy and thick with sleep, would tangle our feet together. I would give you my hip and morning scent, my languid laziness, and say so softly the phrase that would signal a crescendo into marriage, homes, children, all I had been promised since I had draped a towel over my head as a child and walked down a pretend aisle.

But none of that happened. We didn’t fall in love. We started heading down the path but began backtracking like lost hikers desperately searching for a breadcrumb trail. We stopped talking and I started going to bed angry as I lost my grip on words like forever and finally.

Sometime after we broke up, you started coming over again and I found myself caught between the comfort of familiarity and the slap of memory: you on my doorstep with DVDs and ice cream, and you, sleeping heavily while I lay awake after a fight, the only hands touching my body my own.

Live and learn, my mother told me. This too shall pass, she said. Take her back if you really care for her, but don’t hesitate to show her the door if nothing has changed.

I wanted to take you back, to try again, to try harder to fall in love with you, but my mother’s voice came out of my mouth when I told you I wasn’t free on Friday night.