Friday, January 24, 2014

Empty Nights

Tuesday, October 2, 2012
3:21am

It’s another one of those can’t sleep kind of nights, where all you do is lay there and think about all the things you didn’t have time to think about during the day, and all the things you try your best to not think about at night. For whatever reason, there are nights like tonight when all that stuff comes bubbling to the surface and your mind isn’t tired enough to push past the thoughts, and you are left with no other choice than to face them.

I won’t bore you with a run-down of all the nonsense that’s been spinning around in my head for the last two hours. Instead I want to focus on one thing I stumbled upon that I felt was kind of profound.

Maybe it’s just me, but as a single guy I find that most nights I lie here thinking about girls before finally drifting off to sleep. For a long time it was just one girl that I thought of, but the time has come to try and move on from that, so I do my best to ignore her and focus on others. I was sort of doing that tonight. The girl I began thinking about is one that I’ve thought of before. I knew her a long time ago when we were both kids. I kind of liked her back then, but my family moved away and I forgot about her for close to ten years.

I started thinking about what it would be like to—you know—“be with her”. I tried to imagine how I would feel lying there close to her, feeling her body against mine. What would she smell like? What would we talk about? Would I even enjoy it? She is a very nice looking girl, so I have no doubt the man in me would be attracted to her and would enjoy the physical feelings that go along with that kind of situation. But based on past experience, I’m not so sure the experience would leave me completely satisfied.

There was a time not too long ago, while I was at a very low point in my life, that I spent a night  with a girl that I really didn’t know very well. When I say I was “with her”, I don’t mean we slept together. We did get familiar, but that was the extent of it. While it was nice in some respects, I’m not sure I’d do it again. I wasn’t comfortable, and nothing about it felt right. I can’t say for sure if I’d feel the same way with this other girl or not.

Compared to a lot of guys my age I have been with very few girls—only three. And even then, while I’ve gone pretty far with a couple of them, I’ve never been all the way. The first two were girls I had gotten to know on a personal level. I had grown to care about them deeply for who they were and not just how they looked on the outside, and so being with them like that meant something. But the last one was something I would undo if I could. Now it is another lesson learned.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that just sleeping with a girl—even a beautiful one—isn’t what I want. What I’ve found is that more than anything I want to be emotionally connected to someone before having any sort of intimate relationship with them, because the intimacy is what I crave above all else. And no matter what she may look like, how rich her family is, how good she smells, or what she might say to me, unless she is someone I care about, it wouldn’t mean a thing.


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