Checking In

Singlegal

I am affectionately calling my 1500 mile move my “New Life”, and I’m about one month into it. I feel this need to constantly assess how it’s going, as if my New Life needs to be monitored with progress reports to track attendance issues and discipline problems. Sometimes, I look around the subway and wonder if people can tell I am at the start of my New Life. I wonder if I carry some fresh and encouraging look that perhaps radiates to perfect strangers, but mostly, I get back strange glances and looks of “WTF”. That’s OK. It’s largely for my own benefit anyway.

My New Life has come with a New Job that is going well. The New Living Situation has been wonderful, and I count my lucky stars every day that a chance online meeting matched me with a wonderful woman with a great place to live. My New Life has slowly come with some New Friends, and when I am feeling particularly bold and outgoing, I may actually venture out to some of the groups that I have joined in an effort to meet New People.

My Old Life is wrapping itself up in a tidy little package. The “marital home” is being closed on this week, and the divorce paperwork is in full swing once Ex and I can arrange the series of exchanges we need to make due to our distance. Ex is still cordial and positive. He emails daily to ask me “how it’s going” but we never really say anything. Our words are empty and hollow, the polite exchanges of business associates who swap pleasantries before moving on to their business transaction. We don’t know what we want to share, or how much we want to tell each other. This bothered me greatly at first, but with each day, it gets less and less. I see our relationship fading away …. eroding, like a sandcastle in a windy desert. Perhaps more than anything, I miss having someone to talk to like I could talk to him, that just isn’t there anymore. It’s just gone.

Dating ventures in the New Life have been slow going and disappointing. Perhaps I’ll save this as a full blog entry for another day, but responses to online inquiries are minimal and I haven’t found a lot of “matches” that have been true connections. I know I’ve got to give it time, but my New Life Goal of going on a “real” date prior to my birthday is fast approaching, and with no “real” prospects on the table, achievement of said goal is looking bleak. Don’t worry, I’ll offer myself an extension to Christmas, but in a huge city of a million people, why is it so hard for a relatively charming, generally engaging, slightly foul-mouthed Singlegal to get a date? I scratch my head, but have not lost hope. If there is one thing this experience has taught me, it’s to have some patience.

So, that is the check-in on my New Life. I miss only tiny aspects of my old one, and I know that the adjustment will take time and energy. I am still sure that this is the best decision I have ever made, and I still awake with excitement at the possibilities that await me. Let the progress reports keep rolling – I’m passing. Now to work on getting to Honor Roll…

I will buy you a garden
Where your flowers can bloom
I will buy you a new car
Perfect shinny and new
I will buy you that big house
Way up in the west hills
I will buy you a new life
Yes I will

Everclear “I Will Buy You a New Life”.

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