checking out

I am tearing through the checkout women at my local grocery.
No, that doesn't have the same meaning it might for other men.
I've been serial flirting.
So far nothing has come of it, except perhaps amusement (or annoyance) for some. Why these fruitless flirtations? There are moments when it feels like a lack of nerve on my part, but it's more about not being a romantic predator, even when i'm dying of loneliness and desire. In my core, i can't shake my obsession with honesty, my need to nurture and shepherd, or my intuitive understandings of what a given person does or doesn't need.
I teeter on the brink, though...
There was L, a black woman who straightened, yet i was attracted. We had a friendly almost-flirtation. Finally, i wrote her a little note about how she made my heart jump when she looked at me through the store window one day. But i soon got the vibe that she was seeing someone and wanted no part of me.
There was M. For at least a couple months, i almost always went through her line. The attraction was less than "shazam", but she seemed like she might be a peaceful lover, with the drama-diminished aspect of a woman who has passed forty. Once i told her she looked beautiful, and she seemed happily surprised. Once she joked about how often i needed groceries. But it never quite felt right to make that next move. The closest i came was when i offered to loan her a book we'd talked about. She declined, and i moved on...
There was N. I had intensely sexual fantasies about her for a month or so. I gave her my card, with some words about "if you ever need a friend". Once when i was going through someone else's line, she suddenly appeared and gave me an intense smile that bored right into me. But we fizzled, perhaps because i began to sense that i wasn't what she needed...i overheard her say something religious, and started to suspect that her romantic energy was too Cinderella. She's been distinctly cold to me since i started frequenting other lines.
There was O. More than any, she intiated our contact, showing me pictures of her puppy when she saw me buying dog food. Very nice. But i couldn't get past the makeup and tubbiness...or was my intuition just protecting both me and her?
And now there's P, whom i feel stronger about than anyone in a long time. I'm not sure whether the element of strangeness in what i feel for her is just uncertainty about her age. When we met, i thought she might be too young to work there. But over time, her energy has drawn me closer and closer, and i suspect that she's very intelligent. I have fantasies that swirl into irrationality, not just of being the most intense lovers that either of us has ever had (a thousand penetrations of a thousand movements each...), but of living together and impregnations and being mindless, just laughing and loving. I create conversations with her (and edit and re-edit) in my mind. I even felt a stab of pain when i saw some jarhead-looking fellow ask the store manager about someone...i was horrified that it might be her, and that i should have moved sooner, to protect her from someone who would have no clue how to love her. I've gone to the store for five straight days and not seen her. The last time we saw each other, i finally knew for sure that she thinks about me like i think about her - a new line opened up, pulling me out of hers, and the look she gave me was so pointed and warm and naked. I vowed right then to open up to her the next time we met. I now have anxieties that i'll never see her again, never get the chance to speak these words...
ME: May i ask you a stupid question?
HER: Sure.
ME: How old are you?
HER: (something clever)
ME: I promise, that's the last stupid question i'll ever ask you.
The first draft of this article ended on that upbeat note.
Somehow, it felt both true and a copout. My hopefulness with P is in substance no different from the hopes we all feel. We persist in these hopes, even when the world shatters them over and over and over. We still dream of that lover or lovers...longing for an intimacy we will never know.
Those hopes are in the most sacred parts of our being, but they have no real place in this world.
They don't.
I'm sorry.
Perhaps one day, humanity will step beyond the fears that chain us to misery.
I'm not a negative person. Even when this world crucifes my most sacred places, a tiny bloodied voice in me refuses to let hope die.
But our hopes of love have no place in this world. Genuine love or self-love are so alien to us, that were we to suddenly be blessed with such feelings, we would literally go into shock.
My current demon is the awareness of how my life keeps pulling me further and further from being someone the average person could even begin to understand. Is my hope that P is someone who could love me, really more than a projection of loneliness? For i come to a place in my life where romantic possibility has a hard time existing without the companion thought, "How can i explain to anyone, that which it's taken a lifetime to understand?"
Perhaps you have the smallest glimmer of understanding these words.
Perhaps your hopes too, will not die.
Perhaps one day...

(Postscript: i returned to the store every day for two weeks. I never saw her again.)