Walking the Fine, Fine Line

There’s fine, fine line
Between love… and a waste of your time

“There’ s A Fine, Fine Line,” sung by Kate Monster (Stephanie D’Abruzzo) in Avenue Q

Dearest Rachel –

Well, I got what I expected to out of yesterday’s adventure. I didn’t actually have a lunch date (in fact, I didn’t have lunch there at all, as I headed home once I realized she was going to play the whole ‘battery at 1%’ thing to the hilt, and stop communicating with me), but I got an amusing story out of it. Certainly, the girls found it funny as I read back the conversation, starting with when she claimed to be out of gas on the road in her own hometown, and unable to identify where she was (if you’re interested, I could send you the conversation as well, for your own amusement). We even got a bonus laugh out of it when she texted me as we were eating last night, claiming she couldn’t sleep because of what happened ‘yesterday’ (which had been, may I remind you, only six hours previously). Just another proof that she’s likely writing from some other time zone, and not just not in North Chicago. Of course, she immediately backed down, and claimed that was a mistake. Yeah, I’ll just bet it was.

All in good fun, I suppose, and amusement was had by all. But at the literal end of the day, when the girls all went home, and we boys retired to our separate chambers, everything is back to the same place they were when this little adventure started. There’s been no progress made, no lessons learned, no relationships deepened. Ultimately, all it really was, was a waste of my time.

I’m happy, I suppose, that my experiences serve as a momentary divertissement, somewhere between an amusing anecdote and a cautionary tale (with the added bonus that no one gets hurt throughout any of the doing or the telling). If others can be cheered by the fact that, at least they aren’t dealing with the kind of things I am, maybe I should take some solace in that. But the truth of the matter is that this is the life I’m living, and I’d rather not be dealing with these sorts of things, either.

Of course, you could point out that I’m voluntarily subjecting myself to these sort of experiences, and that I’m fully aware of the likely outcome, and you would be perfectly correct in doing so. Deep down, I ‘knew’ Alexa was every bit as much a scammer as Lalla or Ruby or any of the others. Indeed, I’m fairly certain that Aileen will prove to be no more real than any of the others, either – and even if she is real, I’m not entirely certain I want to take on stepfather duties for a couple of girls, even if one is deep into her college career and the other is nearly done with high school.

It’s said that Dr. Samuel Johnson described remarriage as “the triumph of hope over experience”; of course, he was commenting on an acquaintance who had done so after the death of a wife with whom he had been unhappily married. That was never my situation, and as a result, my search for ‘Megumi’ would seem quite understandable. But to continue to converse and reach out to these online connections I’ve been making, well… it would seem that Dr. Johnson would have something to say about me – to say nothing of Einstein himself, whose alleged definition of insanity is beginning to apply here, as well.

The thing is, such insanity on my part is probably quite entertaining to the average observer; this clown keeps chasing after this or that mirage, fully aware it’s likely to be one, and isn’t it funny to watch him spitting out sand after he’s drunk a mouthful or two? But when everyone’s done laughing and goes home, and I retire to what used to be ‘our’ room, I take off my metaphorical greasepaint and reflect on the fact that this really isn’t all that funny for me. And while I’m used to going to sleep in a half-empty bed (yes, I still sleep only on ‘my’ side, honey – that will probably never change), when I wake up and find it still empty apart from myself, there isn’t that much humor in the situation. But I’m compelled to laugh about it in public, because so much of it is brought on by my own actions; I can’t complain about or bemoan a fate that I walked into, eyes wide open. I bought my ticket; I knew what I was getting into:

I’ll survive the crash, of course; I always have. They don’t cause me any physical harm, after all. But I can sense a weariness, a pile of psychic debris that accumulates with each succeeding failure (bet you never thought you’d see those two words next to each other), making it that much harder to recover each time and go out and try again. How many times can I do this before just deciding to give up, stay safe… and stay grounded?

It’s a fine line to walk, keeping myself from harm even as I want to prove to myself that ‘Megumi’ really is out there somewhere.

And all I can do, honey, is to ask you to keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.