Courage

J and I were in Maui for ten days, and it was spectacular to have a change of scenery. It helped me gain clarity on some of my own internal workings and the whole trip was revitalizing. 

During our second-to-last day, J and I were walking around Lahaina, and I pulled him into a bath-and-body store. I love, love, love smelling yummy things. We started poking around the store, and a super cute and smile-y girl who worked there started talking to us. I thought she was so cute! After a while in the store, J and I finally left. "She was so into you!" I was stopped in my tracks. Really? Huh. I was left puzzling to myself. Why didn't I pick up on that? I felt attracted to her, and near the end of our interaction, finally started flirting back with her. Am I that inexperienced with women that I just don't notice and know how to behave? Maybe.

J finally convinced me to go back to the store and give her my number. Just think of it like practice, J said. It took me forty minutes, a ton of encouragement from J, and feeling like I was going to throw up before I could do it. The store had closed, but the lights were on and she was in the front sweeping the floor. The last time I wrote down my name and number for a girl, I ended up having to see her almost every day because she worked at the gym J and I use. But remembering that we were on vacation and leaving soon, I realized that this was a great opportunity to practice. Breathing deeply, I knocked on the door, told her I thought she was really cute and that I wanted to give her my number. She smiled huge at me and said Thanks!

She texted me the next day. What?! And then we had to get on a plane to leave. What?! We ended up going to see her and we spent a good hour chatting with her while she worked. I wanted to kiss her so bad, but there wasn't enough time before we had to leave.

It is rare, I find, for me to feel chemistry with someone. Friend chemistry, romantic chemistry, hot and sexual chemistry. It's all so amorphous and ambiguous. I don't know what happens to make that present. But it was amazing to experience it, and remember that I can feel that with a woman. The whole dating/looking to meet up with women/etc journey is exhausting for me emotionally. I want it so badly, and so I am so grateful to have least experienced what that chemistry can feel like. And then to gather up some courage to act on it, at least intitally. 

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear."

~Mark Twain