We get a life already

After weeks of anger and grief, I’m finally ready to put up a happy post. Bring on the frivolity, I say, one can never have enough! Just returned from Delhi this morning—and Delhi without Shakti was so strange, surreal even. It still hasn’t sunk in that she’s gone, I think in a way the distance helps me, I feel oddly removed from it all, like it happened to someone else. But! Happy news!

One finds oneself in a rather odd position these days. I’m, um, in a committed fling. A CF, if you like. With a nonboyfriend, and a nonrelationship. What exactly is a committed fling, you ask? Well, we’re not seeing other people—at least, I hope we aren’t—and yet it has a time limit, a month and a half to be exact, before it turns into just the sort of long distance thing neither of us wants to do. (And when I say neither of us, I totally mean more him than me, because me? I like long distance romances, it leaves me free to do my thing. Oh well.)

So, ever since I moved to Bombay, I’ve been “dating” a string of people. Dating is in inverted commas, because I never know quite what to call these evenings with boys, this waiting around for the text message or phone call, this dressing up and kissing (and sometimes more than kissing) this feeling of non-emotions (which is why, I suppose, having a nonrelationship makes so much sense to me). But you know, no one I seriously liked. My friends knew them all as New Boy, so much so that they were unable to identify one New Boy from another, they just became a string of New Boys, all eventually dismissed as “that asshole” or “that one who became too clingy” or “that one who I had nothing in common with.” I figured the Nonboyfriend would be one of those, so for like a week, I said, “Haan, so I was out with the New Boy…” and then a week became two and then three, and he was still around, and what’s more I was still around, and not ready to cut my losses and run for the hills just yet. My commitmentphobia is so weird. On the one hand, I really, really want to meet someone and be happy and blah blah, and on the other, I consciously pick men who are physically or emotionally unavailable so that I can eventually blame the not working out on them, and not be this strange messed up person. I realised I was doing this late last year, because I was wondering why I had this Asshole Magnet, when everybody else was doing all right and then it hit me. It really wasn't them. So, I attempted to date men who seemed to want to date me, and then immediately found a zillion things wrong with them and ended everything effective immediately. I suppose the Nonboyfriend could fall into the Physically Unavailable category, seeing as we won't be in the same city for very much longer, but he does seem to like me. And I like him, which is always nice. And (so far) no panic has risen in my gentle (yet stunningly attractive) bosom.

Like many of the men I have engaged in emotional intercourse with in the past, he reads this blog. So, *sigh* one must be chary with details, although I would like to tell you nice things--little details of our connection--record it also for myself, so I remember that not everything is black and white. I swear dudes, I should totally start journalling again, journalling in a notebook with like a pen, with REAL NAMES and REAL INCIDENTS so when I'm all old and senile, I won't have to go, "Who? Whatshisface?"

(Although I can tell you that after dancing around the house singing SexyBack, just to mortify his finer musical sensibilities, I get a text saying: I'm listening to SexyBack and it reminds me of you. I never thought Justin Timberlake would serve as "my song", this is what I get for trying to be cocky.)

How remarkable are my twenties. How serendiptious life is. How many men will I have to keep dating?