Distraction

"You have to lower your standards," she said. "It's amazing how easy it is once you stop caring." It was meant as dating advice, though I didn't ask for any. I wasn't really sure where the statement came from.

"I'll try," I responded. Not sure how to tell her that for the last eight months I'd been in a concussive fog of relative apathy.

The last woman that I'd felt the earth tip for had left me on my ass, with a stiff right hand to the chin - unseen though deserved. It was the type of punch that lingers, that takes you down a peg; the punch that you feel every time you chew. For months after I was reeling, unstable. I would get drunk and invite people to punch me in the face, unwilling to start a fight but eager for wanton, mind-erasing violence. I wrote feverishly in notebooks, wrote songs, listened to broken-hearted crooners. I secretly wallowed in my broken romanticism. But like all passions, it subsided to embers, smoldering in a shell of nonchalance.

I tossed myself into bachelorhood, slept with more women than I had in my entire life. Distractions and possibilities - even something that hinted of potential. Ideas not yet put to paper. But still, nine months gone and it still came back to her, a strange addiction. And so I thought of far-away mountain streams, city streets flickering in foreign dialects, island beaches, strange accents. My thoughts lingering after her like dim shadows.

"I'm serious. Life is too short to worry all the time about love, lost or future. It'll happen." She drank from her wineglass. "Or it won't."

"It will."

"You think so?" She looked at me like a child looked at mall Santas, wanting to believe.

"It happens all the time," I said and kissed her. "Every day."