There’s this space between thinking you might know something and knowing it for sure. It’s a space where you can be divided. A space where you can continue to let your heart pretend something isn’t one way when your brain knows very well that it is. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Who’s fooling who? I don’t know. I just know some part of me got fooled and maybe shouldn’t have.
When my friend said to me, with fingers crossed, “J and K are like this,” I should have abandoned not knowing entirely. Like the way I abandoned it without a backward glance when the HR lady at work told me she wanted to speak with me on my lunch break about a job I’d applied for. I didn’t know for sure, but I also don’t know of many places where they wait until your lunch break to offer you a job. No, that particular giant “fuck you” is about letting you know that you are still firmly ensconced in your current job and will be for the foreseeable future. But somehow “J and K are like this” didn’t make me certain.
I take a lot of responsibility for it, but not all. Less than a month ago, J was saying things like “that place has the best waffles, we should go there.” J was coming dangerously close to cupping my breast in a public place (we were both drunk). The sheer level of innuendo that has gone on between us has left me wondering, at times, why we weren’t leaving a particular bar together. J makes an effort to touch me everyday at work. I’m not the only person he does that with, so that alone would not have made me feel special, but added to the other stuff…well I certainly thought he might be interested. There was certainly room to think that “J and K are like this” might mean they were just good buddies. Or maybe not.
That’s what’s got me wondering about that space between. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe the point is that I don’t need certainty. I don’t need to wait until my friend invites me out for drinks with she and J, only to turn up and find my friend, J *and* K there. I don’t need to wait until we’re walking down a street and I’m watching J and K holding hands, horrified. I don’t need to wait for the assurance of being stuck eating terrible food in a restaurant with poor service while trying to avoid watching J and K stare at each other across their table. No one needs that.
I feel old and stupid and humiliated. I feel like what should have been obvious to me was likely obvious to everyone else around me at work who knew about my crush. I feel like, if I’m going to survive dating, there’s no room for the space between anymore.
