oil and water

We were making out on his couch. I had lifted up his shirt, kissed his chest. I unbuttoned his pants. I kissed him some more. And then I stopped. I put my shoes on, told him that I had to go. “Oil and water,” I may have said. I was out the door insanely fast and heard him mutter a slightly confused, “See you around.”

And with that, my dreams of a romance with this beautiful man that I have hung out with a few times came to an end.

Once back home, in my bed, I wondered how that had gone so wrong wrong, how that date had gone downhill so quickly, wondered if we had some different day instead whether things would have played out differently. I replayed the events, the things said.

I met him at a nearby restaurant last night where he was eating dinner and had a beer with him while he finished his meal. The conversation was slightly awkward, filled with occasional silences that stretched for a couple beats too long. I told him I had finished his book, that I liked it, but that one of the characters was really offensive. That was where things definitely started to take a turn. He said he didn’t want to talk about it. We talked about other things. We talked about Vegas, about Martha’s Vineyard.

We walked back to his house, sat at his kitchen table, drank whiskeys on the rocks, talked about Stephen King and Raymond Carver. The conversation had finally picked up steam and gained a natural energy. He’s beautiful. I kept looking at his green eyes, his big black pupils. He joked about the awkwardness earlier, said we’re kind of like oil and water. I agreed and asked why that was. Neither of us had an answer for why we had a hard time clicking, both of us liking each other, and yet the important thing, some natural chemistry missing. He said with a smile that we’re not going to be life partners. I laughed and said Nope. Given that the conversation was about how nothing was probably going to come out of the two of us hanging out, it was all incredibly jovial and friendly.

Later, when we cuddled on his couch and started to make out, I couldn’t get into it. As sexy as this person, as smart as he is, knowing that what I wanted, a romance, wasn’t going to happen with this guy, I couldn’t continue to kiss him. Sparks weren’t there. Water had been poured all over the matches.

Walking out his door, down his stairs, out his front door, down the block, I kept wondering if it wasn’t too late to turn around, to go back and have sex with him and just enjoy the situation for whatever it was. I didn’t. I had left. Things would be impossibly awkward now. Everything just happened so quickly, so wrongly. I fucked up again and again. I kicked myself the whole way home, wondering why it is that I’m so awkward all the time, why it is I lack the natural social skills of banter that most other human beings seem to have effortlessly. But it is what it is. You can’t force things. The connection is either there or it’s not. And it makes zero sense often why or why it’s not there. On paper, I should be crazy about this person - tall, beautiful, smart, funny, successful - and yet when I was with him I would sometimes have trouble talking to him. When I was with him, I didn’t have the overwhelming desire to rip off his clothes. I just wanted to sit at his kitchen table and drink with him and talk about writers and drugs and life.

He has beautiful hands. I thought of them in bed as I looked at Grindr, briefly wanting something to fill this void I felt, someone to validate me, to make me temporarily forget my self-loathing. What I wanted though wasn’t there. I am not going to find it in pictures of spread assholes and Sups. What I wanted, what I want still, is connection.