The only thing clear to me in my near future is that I will be leaving Seattle. I wanted this city to work- I really, really did. I grew up smoking cigarettes in the old Bauhaus and studying calculus while drinking hot chocolate at B&O Café. When I was sixteen I went to a feminist conference for teens at Nova High School where a hundred adolescent girls attended an "Enjoying Sex" workshop, sat in a circle, and gave each other back massages to practice how to instruct future partners about the kind of touch we liked. I got stoned for the first time in a parking garage outside Seattle Center then walked across the street where I crowd-surfed at Bumbershoot, when the music festival cost $21 for the entire weekend. Thrift shops were my way of life. I wanted nothing more than to meet an amazing man, fall in love, make children, feed them sprouted tofu, and send them off to smoke cigarettes, crowd-surf, buy used jeans, and have good sex in their adolescence.
As Seattle has become wealthier and more corporate, the men have as well, and so I must go, if I have any hope of patching together a love life. Where to? I'm not certain. Oregon and Alaska top the list and living abroad again is a possibility, but regardless, I signed off of OkCupid. I can't invest any more time looking for love in a city that I no longer am in love with.
I spent all of last weekend in Portland with Crazy Chinatown Man who drove up from Eugene to meet me. No one else seems to get why, out of 75 first dates, I like him the most. Living with his mother? Check. Unemployed? Check. He popped a Vicodin in his mouth within the first five minutes of hanging out, and within twenty we were having sex. Physical chemistry doesn't hurt, but it's not why I'm drawn to him. I think my attraction, to sum it up, is that he lived in Seattle before 1995.
Sounds perfect, right? 75 first dates, and I finally found a man who I think I'd be happy with! I'd have to move to Portland, but for the possibility of love and family, I'd frickin' move to Egypt at this point. Yet romance, of course, is two-sided, and just because most men I've been out with have been interested in pursuing a relationship with me doesn't mean that this man feels the same way.
We were drinking and talking about love, my last failed relationship and his, and I had a painful realization culminating from the discussion:
"It's just that, I really, really like you. And you're never going to fall in love with me." I started crying. Because men like that.
He looked sad and held my hand without confirming or denying, which by default confirmed. "R_______, you don't want to be with me. I'm homeless, I'm unemployed, I don't have a car, I have drug issues, I have ex-girlfriend issues..."
Yesssss, but- and maybe I'm a total idiot- so what? Here's what I need from a man that I can't find: I want my partner to be able to sit in the waiting room of my clinic with the addict who lost an arm to heroin, the Spanish-speaking grandma, the morbidly obese woman with an oxygen tank reeking of cigarette smoke, the 17 year old who got chlamydia from her 40 year old Craiglist boyfriend... I want him to be able to sit there, smile at them, and have a normal conversation.
Crazy Chinatown Man is kind of a shit-show, but he is a really, really good and caring person. That morbidly obese woman with the oxygen tank reeking of cigarette smoke? He'd probably offer her a cigarette.
So I will drift with him into the murky waters of not love, great sex, similar values, easy companionship, a clear connection, different states, maybe-I'll-move-to-Portland-maybe-I-won't, solid friendship, spooning naked, games of chess, whiskey shots, and possible children together- if this all works out.
Funny side note? He worked for Amazon in 1998.
