‘Being Drunk’ & Other Ways To Not Get A 2nd Date With Me

Posted on March 3, 2013 by upthestairs87

me(Be my friend?)

So if you haven’t caught on from all my previous posts, or my bio section, I’m single. And for a while now I finally came to the place where I’m ready to start dating again. I was dreading this for a while because I remembered how God-awful it was pre-relationship. I liked being miserable and unable to move on for the time being because it gave me a free pass to avoid the awkwardness of dates. I’ve also got this nasty habit of making dates with people and then at the last minute cancelling because I chicken out and figure that spending the night with friends sounds like a much better option. This time around I’m doing better though, I’ve cancelled a couple times but progress has been made because at least I rescheduled.

Dating hasn’t changed though, it still sucks. My first date ‘back on the field’ was the worst imaginable date possible. Little hint if you ever decide we should go out, these are a few things that I don’t really find attractive:

1. Showing up drunk.
2. Telling me you are a few years older than me and have less ambitions than my sister who’s still in high school.
3. Spending the entire time talking about yourself, acknowledge that you have yet to let me share anything about myself but still keep steering the topics back to you.
4. Buzzcut.
5. Tell stories about your best friend cheating on his wife a lot and how you’re okay with that.
6. Confiding that your own mother has referred to you as another word for a cat.

This again was all in one date.

Dating can be easy, at least easier than having to find friends in the same place in life as I am at 25 years old. I say this because I recently realized that all of my friends who live in close proximity to me are now part of a couple. This isn’t a bad thing and I’m not the bitter, single friend who’s upset for their happiness. Far from that. It’s just that couples and singles have very different priorities. No matter what, when you’re part of a couple if you have nothing to do and want to just stay at home, at least you have someone to do that with. I don’t even have my cat anymore.

So I’m on a mission to find some good, single lady friends so I’m not constantly harassing the happy couples I know. But this is much harder than it sounds. There’s no website called, ‘www.willyoubemyfriend.com’ Meeting a friend can be so much harder to do than finding a date on a Friday night. Guys are easy, put on some skinny jeans and a low cut shirt and more than likely I’ll find a date for a night to be determined but trying to meet a fellow straight woman doesn’t work the same way. The first friend I ever made was Kaitlyn, that was 21 years ago and all I had to do was wander over to her desk and ask her point blank if she wanted to be my friend. I can’t keep using that move because apparently it gets creepier the older you get.

So I haven’t figured out the best way quite yet to making these new friends but I’m working on it. In the meantime if you know any fun, single ladies out there looking for a good time, send them my way. I’ll be the creepy girl staring at them in the corner trying to figure out how to start the conversation.

“Nice hair? Shoes? Nail polish? No, you’re so lame Kasey!“

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Healing Hearts

Posted on February 27, 2013 by upthestairs87

o2(This is what it means to be held, how it feels when the sacred is torn from  your life and you survive.)

Six years ago today one of my best friends passed away. She was entirely too young, too pretty, too fun, too friendly, too smart and too perfect for that to happen to. At the time, it rocked my world to the core. I had only known her for five years but I was only 19 and that was quite a long time. I grew closer to her in those few years than I ever was to many friends I’d known for much longer.

I still think about her every day and the pain of losing someone I loved, someone who made such a significant impact on my life, will never fully go away. I was angry for a while and my emotions alternated between that and sadness for quite a bit. I felt selfish and guilty for continuing to miss her like I did. My mind constantly felt like it was riding on a carousel that wouldn’t let me off.

I still feel a pain in my gut when I think of her infectious laugh and my eyes still water at the memories we shared. I still have to remind myself that she isn’t coming back. I won’t be seeing her again for quite while. I often think about her, but it’s not nearly as much as it was in the beginning and this gives me hope. Her memories bring me mostly joy now instead of pain.

I found this entry on my old blog that I posted a couple weeks after she had passed:

“So last night it snowed late and really hard. I was driving home around 1:30 and it was so beautiful. It was the perfect snow, soft and fluffy. Then this morning it started raining, it had warmed up enough so that all the snow turned into raindrops. It was a bit messy because there was so much snow on the ground that it turned all to slush and with the rain coming down it only added to it all, making it very wet. Flooded even in some areas.

Anyway, on my way to work this morning I felt like Alice in Wonderland. You know the part where Alice is a giant and starts crying really hard and creates a huge flood around her, which turns out to be bad because then she does become small and finds herself floating and lost in her own tears.

That’s how I felt. Some parts of the road felt like they were up to my door handles and when I stepped outside it went up to my knees, I felt like this past week after I had cried so much I was now swimming in my own tears, or at least God’s.  It sounds weird, I know, but it was almost comforting. I knew God was there, and even better I knew he understood.“

So on this day I remember her and the amazing person she was and I am grateful that her friendship is still teaching me something even after these long six years. I am able to remember the pain I felt during that time of my life and it gives me comfort to know that I’ll get through the twist my life has taken now. I could apply that entry above to exactly how I felt the weeks following my break from him in my life. It’s a good thing though, because if I could get past losing her I can most certainly get past him. Even though losing him was like ripping a piece of me slowly apart, a pain I didn’t think I’d ever have to experience again I did, and I survived…again. There’s no comparison for the two of them when it comes to who they were to me and how they treated me and it wouldn’t be fair to even attempt that. I’m just so filled with joy that even today, I can look back at one of the most devastating days of my young life and know that I’m doing just fine. I can think of her today and smile, just like she would have wanted.

Her memory continues to give me hope and strength. So I know I’ll be just fine when it comes to removing the hold he still has over my heart and mind. One day I’ll look back at my time with him and the agony this whole process has caused and the pain will no longer be there, and I have Olivia to thank for that.

Thanks Liv.

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Forever Young

Posted on February 25, 2013 by upthestairs87

b&w2
(We are the reckless, we are the wild youth.)

25.

25.

I’m 25.

I’m 25 for 6 months and 3 more days.

Yet I keep telling people I’m 26. I’m not sure why. I should be embracing the younger age right now. I’m on the downhill slope of my 20’s, careening toward my 30’s. (I hate to ski and I hate skiing metaphors even more.)

One of the first things I realized when I became single again was that this will be it, these are the final years I can enjoy being truly ‘young.’ Of course I only realized this after I’d gone through 88 boxes of tissues and shed 25 lbs from malnutrition. I smartened up though and thanked God I came out of the relationship with as little baggage as possible. It’s not like I had a kid hanging off my arm because we’d gone our separate ways. I was just as free as I’d been when we first got together.

The realization I came to is true though. I know that when you get older people tell you that you’re young at heart but that’s not really the same thing, is it? When you’re old, you’re old, your body and mind give you away. You remember things that those younger than you don’t and you forget things that you should really remember. Hair gets thinner, thighs get bigger and the signs of wrinkles start showing up everywhere. So really the people that say that are just placating the older ages, which allows them to hang onto their drunken nights probably a little longer than they should.

You know how job interviews will ask where you see yourself in five years? Well I see myself done school, holding a steady job that I enjoy and hopefully bringing in a bigger paycheck that in turn will make my savings account a bit larger, but besides all of that adult stuff I want to have a young life that was lived.

I want another tattoo, I want to live somewhere completely out of my comfort zone, and I want to wear a strapless dress and not worry about my ‘man arms’.

I don’t want to care about buying area rugs, or have a certain day of the week I go grocery shopping and I’m certainly not ready to give up the somewhat thin-ish stomach I still have.

I’m not ready to be called ‘Mom’, I like having to do my laundry only once a month and I don’t want to keep vegetables in my apartment yet.

I want to be able to go visit my best friend in NYC on a whim, staying out until 4 a.m., I’ve probably got a couple more first kisses in me before I reach my last, and I’m not ready to store all my boxes of photos from high school in a dusty garage, never to be seen again.

I always felt unfinished when I was with him and now I know why, I’m not quite done living yet.

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Playa’s Gonna Play

Posted on February 22, 2013 by upthestairs87

tattoo

Dear you,

I got your message late last night. It was 5 simple words strung together but if that same sentence was sent by any one of my other friends I wouldn’t have spent the rest of my night trying to decode what it could have possibly meant. You have a way of getting inside my mind without even trying and I feel like the bratty kid on the playground yelling, “It’s not fair!” as I pout by the slide.

I don’t know why I let you do this to me. It’s been many years now of always the same thing from you. I am a strong, confident woman who doesn’t like to play these types of games.

And yet I do it. This can’t even be a letter of rant toward just you or the rest of the male gender because we, as human beings, are all guilty of it. Male and female alike. We all have that certain person that is just slightly more into us than we can reciprocate.  So we continue to string them along with small, encouraging words just to keep the interest alive.

It’s sick, twisted and yet I’m guilty of it too. There have been men in my life that have only heard from me in my darkest of days, the days when they were least expecting it. They never get the best of me, only the worst and no one deserves that kind of treatment.

I guess what truly bothers me about our short conversations is that they are just that, short. Nothing ever more than the basics, no depth or intensity can be found within the words we send by screen. I long for more. I long for your face attached to the mind of someone that can entertain me for longer than an hour. I am part of a generation that thinks intimacy can come from a few ’bouts of small talk and I can’t seem to stop the pattern.

So I’ll continue my pity party and sulk in my corner and try to forget about you and the way you make my heart speed up by the obnoxious, ‘Hey’ late at night. And I’ll succeed until I hear from you again in approximately 27 days.

Hopefully.

I’ll be waiting.

Love,
Me

(Seems appropriate.)

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Whispers At Night

Posted on February 19, 2013 by upthestairs87

alone girl“Did she make your heart beat faster than I could?“

I can’t even listen to angry, 90’s, women singers anymore because he loved them. We listened to them on every road trip, singing until we had no more room for words in our heads or lungs. He took them away from me. So now I only listen to less than ideal rock bands. I scream the blood pouring out from my heart at 100 miles an hour as I reminisce about how he looked at me with sad eyes every last time we met, taking away my ability to leave the red imprint of my hand across his paled cheek. He fooled my emotions by burying his head in my chest and telling me how he’d had to drown the week away with bottles of emptiness to get through it without me. My limp, defeated hand had no power to move from those few words.

He took away my ability to cry when he told me he couldn’t stand to see my eyes turn green anymore. He could always tell when he’d stepped past the line we cautiously danced around because they’d slowly turned the color of an angry sea as I tried to hold back the hurricane begging to be set free. I always said I’d give my life away to the man that noticed how easily my eyes changed colors, now I’d give anything to have my life back.

He knew just how to touch me. One hand here, gently on my knee, a light finger pressed on my waist to comfort my nerves, a kiss on my neck to make me feel wanted, wild nights gave my body an excuse to be his. His lips never found my ears though. The touch of insecurity, it made me pull away from him. He never wanted me that far from him.

I think of two drums echoing in my ears as we sometimes teased and played. The excitement our now damaged hearts heard, that short while ago, will replay like a broken record in a locked room. The lifeline of our human selves never forgets, it’s a gift and a curse. We had always laughed at couples with matching tattoos and swore we’d never be like them and yet here I am, with his name forever imprinted on my delicate heart, never to be forgotten.

He is never forgotten, only mourned like the passing of a summer. Mourned until a new season awakens and begins, and then it starts all again. So next time, I’ll brace myself for the impact of our anxious hearts colliding.

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