"Jesus, those are big tits." They certainly were, especially encased in a tight white t-shirt that made them appear impossibly round and luscious. I assumed that when released from their holder, they'd droop or drape, but the fantasy these babies presented was impeccable, amazing and intimidating. My normal me, the old me, would have avoided looking at them, a task made more difficult because Rebecca is an inch or so taller than me. They were directly in my line of sight, which placed them smack in the middle of fantasy central. My old me would force myself to look into her eyes. I'd command my eyes to make them invisible.
Ah but the new me looked at those big boobs and said, "Jesus, those are big tits." Then I looked into Rebecca's eyes. "I know you're not your boobs, but those really stand out and if I pretend they don't then I'm not being honest with you. And I really want to be honest with you because I like you. I just don't want to pretend I don't notice those," and I pointed. The old me would not have pointed, gestured or in any way indicated my urgent desire to grab hold, squeeze, evaluate and otherwise enjoy those tits.
"They are huge," Rebecca said in a neutral tone.
"You probably don't know any other way, but - well, let me tell you my theory about beautiful girls" - note that I called her beautiful indirectly - "My theory is that beautiful girls get looked at by everyone they meet in totally different ways than ordinary people like me. I mean guys look at you and all the time they're thinking sex, sex, sex and girls look at you and evaluate your looks, find flaws, hate you because you're beautiful, all the stuff that women obsess about with other women. You don't know what it's like for the rest of us. But you know what?" She looked at least a little interested to see where I was going. "I think that's too bad." I leaned toward her. "I think that's one reason beautiful girls often end up with jerks. Think about it: the jerks are the ones who have the guts to try, who'll tell lies, who'll say whatever they need to say to get the beautiful girl and the beautiful girl has trouble seeing the truth because she's been getting all this fucked up feedback from the world that only sees the way she looks."
I stopped. Even if this date didn't go anywhere, I was enjoying making my speech. I am normally uptight on dates. I worry whether she'll like me. I worry what I should do, if I should make a move, if I should back off, and all that worrying means I don't really enjoy the date - and because I don't enjoy the dates, I don't ask out more women.
My life has been full of vicious cycles like these. Take Rebecca's tits. My normal me would be figuring out how to avoid being absorbed by their gravitational field. I'd start to find fault with them - maybe they're big floppies, maybe the nipples are really odd, maybe she has a tattoo of a sailor on one. See? In trying to be a nice guy, I'd be ruining my whole image of her without actually ever really knowing her or seeing and feeling her tits. That's plain stupid, but that's what I do.
My normal me would also have a fantasy goal. I want to fuck her. I want to get her on top of me so I can play with those babies and then fuck her without a condom so I can feel her inside and then cum in her. It doesn't happen because I'm hung up on the worries associated with treating this living centerfold like she's plain and flat. It never happens because I would freaking freeze or misread the signals and make a wholly inappropriate move. And then I'd compound the problem by not knowing at the end of the date if she wanted to see me again or if I wanted to see her or whatever and God it all confuses me.
All I know right this minute is that I want to tell Rebecca that she's got fantastic looking tits and that I want to know the real her so I can see what else she has going for her. So I do. "I guess what I'm trying to say is I want to know more about you. I can see what you look like and that's fantastic, but you know I want to . . . I want to . . . I'm looking for the right words here." I looked to her for help. "I don't want to say I want to get to know you better. It's a cliché." I indicated with my hands that I meant more. "It's true but I mean more. I mean . . . I think there's something special about you. I don't know what it is exactly, but I get that feeling."
A tremendous amount goes through your head at every moment. Most of it never reaches the surface; it gets cut off somewhere below, subsumed into another thread, rendered irrelevant and consigned to the depths of your unconscious self. But every now and then, the full realization of a moment floods over you. You are gripped by a vision of the all-encompassing complexity, the texture of all your thoughts, everything in that one moment perfectly aligned - and then passing once more into the chaos of the ordinary.
I may sound like a guy who can't get a woman, but the opposite is true. I get women all too easily. The problem, my problem, is that I'm not happy with myself, with my looks, with my personality, with my whole way of being. I don't feel like I'm ever in control of what I'm doing, so I don't feel comfortable. I shy away from some women - usually the ones I want the most - and end up with others and then find that I don't really want to be in bed with them, not if it means they want more from me than a night or two of purely physical exchange. For reasons that have never been clear to me, these women do want relationships, almost every one, and that has confused the heck out of me, as though life is there for the picking if only I could understand a little better.
I see this girl and she is really cute but for some reason my whole mind locks up in her presence. And that girl is so incredibly sexy but the thought of actually mounting her makes my insides quiver not in anticipation but fear. What if I can't satisfy her? What if I fail? What if the woman I find sexy finds me repulsive?
Women tell me I'm very good looking, even gorgeous, but I've never bought it. I used to look in the mirror and call myself "the dog-faced boy" and I still feel that way. My skin is too pale. My hair is a weird color. I have wide shoulders and a small waist, but I don't have big muscles. I've measured my cock at a hair short of seven inches but it looks so damn small to me. I'm not tall. I'm not short either, but I always feel small.
Friends in high school used to mess up my hair because they said it always looked too perfect. I had no idea what they meant because I wouldn't even comb it in the morning. Other kids' mothers used to take snippings from my shoulders in the barber shop, saying "I'll match this color." I felt like crawling under a rock.
Why am I this insecure? I've always been shy, painfully shy. I sometimes think it's because I was very aware when I was young, that I could see too far into what was happening around me before I was ready to put it in perspective. I'm deathly afraid, but I don't know what I'm afraid of. It's like I'm still that little kid seeing the world, being confused and frightened by it and then retreating from it, hiding in my room whenever I can, getting lost in my thoughts - half of which are about why I'm so afraid.
I long ago decided that you have two choices, but you really don't have a choice at all. You can try to do things naturally, going with the flow, or you can try to think it all out, following your thoughts down every wrong turn in the hope that one of those trails will lead you out of the forest. Two choices may exist, but I was never able to choose the first. As much as I wanted to relax, I couldn't. I wanted to let life take me so I could experience without worry, without always having a voice in my head saying "no", but I couldn't get past my need to analyze every aspect.
That was old me. New me doesn't give a fuck. New me is the old me who maybe, just maybe finally put the pieces together. It came on me in a flash. I was playing pool with a friend, talking about nothing, playing with Harry and Lucy, his Rottweilers. I almost lost a leg in an accident when I was young and, while I'd recovered thanks to extraordinary luck and a very good surgeon, I'd always felt weak and damaged, crippled in an undefinable but real way by the experience. My leg would never be good. It could never stand up to real punishment. It would let me down. So I avoided giving my leg the chance to fail. I turned avoidance into an art.
When it was my turn to shoot, I had to lean way out over the table, lifting one leg high in the air while balancing on the other. One of the dogs, in a canine fit of affection, pushed hard against the leg holding me up, my bad leg, and all the thoughts shot into my mind, flashing like a giant warning beacon: "It's weak. It's going to crumble." But at the same moment, I'd instinctively reacted by stiffening my knee and pushing back at the dog. My leg held and in that moment of insight I knew the only difference was that it felt odd, that my leg was strong, perhaps stronger than the other, but it didn't feel the same. I made the shot and ran my hand over the ridge on my hip where I could feel the scar line. Some of the nerves had been damaged, not the deep ones for function but those nerves that tell you on a superficial level how things feel.
That was not the moment of true learning. I went to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and told myself I should accept that my leg is not weak, that it just feels different. I'd noticed this a hundred times before, but now I felt like I might actually understand what that meant. My leg felt different and that was all. There was nothing wrong with it. I was not weak. My leg would not fail. I would not fail.
The question then immediately popped into my head: then why do I see flashing lights every time I think about my leg or try to do something with it? The answer entered me, not just my mind, but every part of me. The flashing lights, I realized, were there to attract me but I'd interpreted them as a warning not to look. When I thought about my leg, I'd turn away from the light when the light was actually intended to get me to look. I'd reversed the meaning. I felt a relief that can't be described, though later I felt stupid for not understanding the obvious.
I decided to look for flashing lights and move toward them. If they flash, I told myself, I must reverse my instinct to run and instead do the opposite. It just so happened that a lot of those lights were connected to women. Oh God how I love women, the way they look and walk and feel and sound and the way their bodies fit to man's.
