I’ve recently been involved with someone that I went on a date with over the summer. He actually couldn’t be more different than I. As in, I’m quite certain that our planes of reality, by a fluke, coincided.
He has a wild and sordid past with forays into veganism, drugs, and meditation. I have a quite simple past that is nothing new from any other college girl that has come before me. He’s going to India for a year because he wants to go on that transcendental journey to discover the part of himself that’s been missing. I want to go to graduate school for philosophy because I already think that part of me that’s missing is lost. My point: we couldn’t be more different.
I saw him this past weekend for a brief visit home and the interaction, while wonderful, left me feeling strange. I’m not a very vulnerable sort. That’s not to say that I’m not honest because that’s something I pride myself on. If someone asks me a question, I’ll answer it honestly. Most people just don’t ask the right questions. The brief period of time I spent with him, *Kyle for matters of convenience, was absolutely wonderful. We talked about everything: ranging from funny stories about kids shooting bbs (I really don’t know how to spell that, sorry I’m a girl) into his window to our feelings on relationships and their paradoxical ability to repair and destroy. And beyond that, for the first time in longer than I can remember, Kyle asked the right questions.
One of my biggest fears is that I’ll meet someone who will ask the right questions, I’ll answer, and then they’ll leave. They are free to take my answer with them and continue their lives, but I’m left having given my answer, and that isn’t easy for me. Kyle actually is leaving. As I said, he’s going to India for a year and most likely, I won’t see him when he comes back in November 2012.
Since Kyle is of the hippie yuppie sort, he’s really into the idea of serendipity-timing aligning. I left this situation thinking, “how could any of this possibly be serendipitous timing?” This is someone that I know I could potentially be good with, and it’s now reduced to that one time I went home and hung out with Kyle for a little while and it was nice. But in a way, that’s almost the point.
The serendipity is not that I found the love of my life and we’ll grow old together (besides, the cynic in me doesn’t even believe in that). The serendipity is that there was someone I was with for a brief period of time and he helped me see that that kind of thing is possible. It is possible for me to be with someone who is different than me, but somehow we find a common ground. It is possible for me to be happy after being devastated from a breakup. It is possible for someone to be a brief intersection in another’s life and have it be wonderful.