If I could slap a soundtrack on those first few days with her it would be Can't Feel My Face by The Weekend – being that close to her was numbing, but I loved it.
Elon Musk once said that "Life can't be just about solving problems...sometimes it should be about having an adventure" - which is hard to believe considering he is probably the most die-hard, ambitious problem solver on earth. I completely agree, and I was living mine and enjoying every millisecond of it. Elon was referring to space travel as an adventure, rather than a woman, but hey...to-may-to, to-mah-to.
Down the rabbit hole.
Chapter 3 felt a little protracted – I just felt it deserved all the details. Those few days with Jay were surreal and while my conscience kept nudging me to tell Jay I had a girlfriend or just stop talking to her altogether, I just could not – I couldn't throw a speed bump in front of what we had going on – we were high on each other driving happily over the speed limit and I just wanted to keep moving fast...not bothering about what was ahead.
I was so far down the rabbit role, consumed with that feeling of needing to know.
I understood perfectly what this was – the age-old conundrum where you begin to drift out of a relationship that should have ended because you met something new and exciting.
On a certain episode of the Showtime series Power – Angela is having a disagreement with her sister Paz over Angela's lover – Paz says to Angela in a Hispanic-American accent "Listen mami, it's easy to love someone when you see them only once a day"; the more widely applicable version of this is 'It's easy to love and obsess over the new person, when they seem all perfect and pristine, before all the excitement dies off, before you really get to know them, and you've seen them at their low points, and you have fights regularly and all those mannerisms that you liked about them when you met them are the very ones that now annoy you the most'.
I wasn't naïve – I was under no illusion that that wasn't what it was – I just didn't care. My girlfriend at the time was simply an amazing person, we had ups and downs like everyone else and even though I knew I shouldn't be stepping out like that, I could not help it – nothing had ever felt more right. When I think about it again, she probably veered off a similar tangent at the time (and she was in the right to do so) – I should say at this point that I had no intention of cheating on Anne, she really was one of the sweetest people you could ever meet – I met her when she was quite young and we both made a lot of mistakes – I think for each other we were essentially that person that you 'break a lot of things with' so you know 'how to not break things' with another person (or other people) in the future – I went through my process of self-discovery with Anne...so naturally the relationship was bound to leave a lot of negatives in its wake; I once said to a friend of mine that "We all have to get the Chrisanns before we meet the Laurenes....."
*A reference to Chrisann Brennan and Laurene Powell, 2 of Steve Jobs' love interests at 2 very different points in his life...both of them were lovely people; Steve dated Chrisann and much later married Laurene* - I'm not saying Jay is Laurene in that analogy, but Anne certainly was Chrisann – she dated a not-so-good version of me...but I'm better now, much better. *
I just got back to my laptop, it's about 3pm on a Thursday, I'm listening to Fire Escape by Foster the People and I just had a slice of rye bread and mayonnaise – rye bread reminds me of the time I used to live in Moscow; Russians love rye bread, they call it Chornee Hleb (black bread) and add it to almost everything they eat – Soup for lunch, rye bread on the side, potatoes and beef, rye bread on the side...it's like a sickness.
