A Girl with a Postponed Cross-Country Move

Tangled little heads halfway across the globe; yup, I’m going to talk about that again, but perhaps in a more interesting way than I had anticipated. Life is nothing, if not one big long lesson – subject after subject, with Netflix marathons sprinkled in between.

From the beginning The Turk has been all about exclusivity, whereas I have been very anti-exclusivity. After my history with love and men and falling on my face, I don’t enter into these things lightly and historically take a few months of vetting a guy to commit to him anyway. And I like to think I learn from my past mistakes, trips, and those that's-nice-but-not-rights. Shortly into his departure I made sure he knew where I stood: it was my fear any potential would otherwise crash and burn; my head already spinning. It would be like putting all of your eggs in one weird-ass Goodwill sans-instruction-manual pressure cooker. The differences between Egypt and Turkey, The Ex and The Turk, working and holiday, five months and three weeks, 22 and 30, and ‘I love you’ and ‘I like you’, are worlds apart – a world that would fuck up any potential.

Our communication and understanding of one another isn’t sufficient enough to overcome misunderstanding or convey hurt feelings 5000 miles away. Our modes of in-relationship were never established. And, moreover, hypothetically irrelevant since we were not, in fact, in a relationship: You can’t just claim something have it be true. If he wants me, he needs to earn me - à la Olivia Pope. Plus, this is a man I barely knew. You can't just graze right past all the fun parts of infatuation and newly dating to immediate missing misery. That's not fair! I want the good stuff first!!

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Also, I have this horrible tendency to just fall into relationships; like my head is a weight into a hole...or onto staircase. A tendency I have spent years rebelling against. Still, as much as I resist, once I let go, it’s a mother fucking rabbit hole...or face plant into the second step. And I sure as shit wouldn't fall in love with a promise or to commit myself to a memory of 19 days. And I remind myself of this as I think of him still, but also fearing that I’m forgetting everything. And fearing that when he comes back, he’ll have forgotten about me, as he has the opposite problem of getting - in his term - “distracted”. (Not a insecure mindfuck at all there, guy.)

All in all, this has grown into an incredibly strange thing. I miss the idea of what he has the potential to be and the nightly calls (as much as I hate to admit that), which have stalled to a once a week Skype. But as I sit here halfway through his absence and heading into being apart longer than we were getting to know each other, I begin to wonder if we built enough desire to survive not seeing each other for twice as long as we hung out. Can a romance of 20 days survive the absence of 40? And how’s that for the fucked up part: I’m the one who’s resisting and also the one worrying I’ll have nothing to resist.

So, here I am: dating put on pause. What an awfully awkward position this is - as if I'm not weird enough in totally normal circumstances! While I uncomfortably navigate this fucked up situation, complete with general fears and personal oddities, I retain hope that we can start over when he gets back. But this world apart lacks the understanding of longevity to trump all the awkwardness and confusion, so we’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I should enjoy being solo, because at the moment that’s all I still am: A single girl with a postponed cross-country move to Seattle. And a new tentative date set for late March/April 2015.