The Café Vanellas

10: on sweet sensations

// Toriv

I woke up on a chilly March morning, completely alone.

For a while I just lay there, enjoying the warmth of the blankets and listening to my rats puttering around in the next room. It was peaceful and nice, but I couldn't help feeling like something was missing. Like that annoying feeling you get when you're about to walk out the door but you're super convinced you've forgotten something important, like your keys or your brain.

"Shit," I said softly, then I rooted around in the covers until I found my phone.

There was already a message waiting for me from Mahendra. It just said Good morning :) Happy Sunday, but even those few little words felt nice. I felt weirdly like I'd accomplished something, although you could argue the opposite since I had totally failed to bring him home, or get invited home, or manage anything even approaching petting of any kind. This was so far outside of my regular dating habits that I guess I was still figuring out how to react to the whole thing.

When my mind starts to feel a little weird like this, the best strategy I've come up with is to lie somewhere comfy and think out my thoughts in as organized a fashion as I can manage. This doesn't always work because as you've probably noticed by now, my thoughts like to run off in any direction the wind takes them, but I try, okay? I try a lot.

So I buried myself back in the blanket, pushed my head under the pillow and did my very best bug in a rug impression. It was extremely cosy for about five minutes, but then I started running out of air and overheating like nobody's business. None of this is really great for thinking thinky thoughts, so I kicked off the blanket and flailed around in the bed until I'd dug a sort of channel in the mass of softness. Then I laid on my back, crossed my arms and stared at the fairy lights covering my bedroom ceiling. In the nighttime those lights look pretty magical, all soft and glowy, but in the daytime when the wires taped to the ceiling all show, it's kind of a letdown. But whatever, that wasn't what I was lying there to think about! Thinky thoughts. Good, proper, definitely not-sexy thinky thoughts.

At this point, I could tell you that I lay there in deep meditation for a respectable amount of time, going over my life choices in excruciating detail and coming to some grand conclusions about my existence that were sure to carry me to the gates of the kingdom of elf heaven. But the truth of the matter is, I'm just not that smart. Or more like, the amount of smarts I do have tends to be cancelled out by the amount of time it takes me to gather up these smarts, put them in a box so they don't run away, and carry them over to whatever part of my brain needs them the most at any given moment. Do you see what I'm saying? It was going to take more than a casual hangout in my own bed to figure out these thinky thoughts and I wasn't about the waste the day trying to hammer my feelings into a shape that made sense.

What I did figure out as I was making coffee, feeding the rats and grimacing at the weather report was that I had actually managed to have a ton of fun with someone without needing the happy ending, as it were. This might seem obvious to any normal person, but when you've lived most of your adult life in the hard and fast and no-time-for-feelings-where's-the-booze way that I have, some of your perspective will want to slip away quietly until it feels like you're ready to handle it.

The next logical question was, was I ready to admit to Mahendra that I enjoyed being around him just for the sake of it? Wasn't that already taking the whole thing one step further than I had ever planned? When I'd first agreed to go out with him I hadn't really been thinking about the next time or the time after that. I'd never really had to before, so why was I gonna start now? It's not like I had never been asked out randomly by handsome strangers in my own neighborhood. In my experience, that kind of encounter usually ends in a grand slam, then nothing. Which is how most guys seem to prefer it these days, so who am I to complain? Isn't that just how the world works now?