Sometimes when I see you, I wonder why I have gotten so upset about this, how on earth this thing got blown so far into crazyland, beyond the realm of being able to handle things calmly and rationally. Sometimes I look at you and I ask myself, This one? Why this one? What on earth is so remarkable about this one that I can't at least try to find a different one, one that will talk to me or at least look at me and acknowledge my existence? But that isn't fair. Certainly part of this dysfunction has to be due to my own flaws and insecurities. It isn't your fault that I was a veritable minefield of pain and trauma.

Still: why you? I backtrack through my mind, through the path of time. I was always mentally aware that you were attractive to me, but I had put up a barrier, a wall of defense, right away. Occasionally, very occasionally, I watched you, covertly, only for a second or two, and pretended to myself that I hadn't. It was like watching a butterfly flit through one's field of vision, ever so briefly and then forgotten. Then one day, you called and I talked to you. I hate phone calls. I had hardly spoken to you before. I was surprised to find that I had enjoyed talking to you, that there had been some sort of a connection, of finding oneself on the same page, that I'd ended up talking much longer than I would have expected to. Something flickered briefly on the horizon of my mind. I brushed it away. My partner was jealous I'd talked to you for half an hour. I said he was being silly....and I believed that.