My Only One

I'm a pretty cynical person. I like to dress it up as "practical" or "logical," but the fact of the matter is I hate chick flicks, (except for My Best Friend's Wedding) weddings, mushiness after about 30 minutes, happy couples, puppies, rainbows, and cupcakes. I don't believe in happily ever after, I don't think love is what gets you through life, and I generally don't cry in movies, or about much of anything unless I'm pissed.

I don't know how I got to be this way. I wasn't like this before. I used to be able to fall in love and just be in love without so many stupid thoughts. I used to be able to not worry about the future, trust the people I loved, and take things as they came. Actions like these, of course, got my heart broken to bits multiple times, and I got hard. Slept around. And eventually woke up, because I wasn't doing myself any good.

So I got into a relationship that made sense--took my hardness and molded it into a different form. I prided myself on how calm and rational this relationship was. Loved the fact that there was no drama. Loved that my family loved him.

And now he's giving me Hollywood kisses in the produce section. Making me dance in Starbucks. Twirling me, kissing me, kidnapping me to take a walk with his friend. And I know this would all be a lot more interesting if I were 35, in a Sex-and-the-City or Nick Hornby sort of way, but the very realness of leading a functional life scares me shitless. It's a lot easier to be single and screwed up. It's all there on the surface. But with stability comes so much subtle terror.

I could lose him. I could lose him at any point--in the standard breaking up sort of way, or when we're thirty-eight and the whole kids thing is just starting to get comfortable, a little. We could lose a child. A brother, a sister, one or four of our parents.

It's so much easier to have nothing to lose. I think that's why I'm so cynical. I don't want to have anything to lose. But I already do--I have a brother I adore, and two parents who are my best friends, and R's getting under my skin, no matter how logical he was in the beginning, and I'm starting to think we've got a really good thing going here.