My Toe in the Water

I joined a dating service -- a dare for myself.  I've gone out with three men.  Slept with one.  It is rather thrilling in the moment -- the emails, the meeting, the sex. But in the end I sleep alone and it is still lonely. I'm doing this with a measure of hope for connection and also because it seems like the practical thing to do.  Why sit home?

I have a lot of friends.  I have standing invitations to go to the Hamptons, to Fire Island, to California.  Before the summer is over, I will go to each place I'm fairly certain.

I don't sit around thinking of fetuses. Babies don't make me weak-kneed. I go about my life like a person unburdened because lately that is how I feel. But I don't trust myself. No matter how okay I might appear, there is an emptiness in me. No matter how hard I laugh or how far I travel.  

How to explain it now?  It's not the same grief I lived with a few months ago.  It's quiet and doesn't need to be discussed -- I suppose this begs the question of why I must write about it if nothing else needs to be said.  I have no answer to that. 

Every time I get my period, I think of the abortion clinic.

On Saturday, a friend and I went to Roosevelt Island. From the southern tip of the island, you have a wonderful view of the ruins of the smallpox hospital framed by an ugly bridge. It's an only-in-New-York moment that makes my chest tighten up.  

My ex emails me often.  I wish he would say why.  But we talk about the weather and writing and things that, to me, don't matter quite so much.