I moved to a new city recently.

This is not a big surprise. In the last ten years, I moved to a new city five times. The recent move, however, involved the desire for a man.

Love uprooted me the first time when I was 20. I left home for San Francisco to be with my boyfriend. It was très romantique.

Now, I am far from 20, still single, and moving to a metro of prospective lovers known for its smart, creative men. If I am a kid, this is my candy store. Moving for a guy before I know who he is? Call it creative manifesting.

Gotta have faith. Mail order brides do it all the time.

You might wonder why my rent checks have seen so many addresses. Near strangers have asked: “What are you running from?” And then, equally as existential, “What are you running to?” My grandma just calls me fickle.

But years ago, at a reunion with the other side of the family, I walked into a room of people who looked like me and talked like me and walked like me. My grandpa on that side, whom I hadn’t known in my adult life, called himself a gypsy. They moved all the time, he told me, and still he longed for other places he had been to and loved. I felt all at once peaceful in my restlessness.

First Date

Here in my new town, I went on a date, happy to sample the candy on my new adventure. I had met the man on Match.com while still in my former city. It was remarkable how well the date was going, considering we’d hardly talked before this.

I had set up a profile before my move, thinking the distance would force me to get acquainted online. (It’s easy to bypass get-to-know-you and go straight to do-I-like-you-in-person?) Instead, we traded one-liners and then met for a drink. Surprise, then, what happened.

The conversation went super deep really fast. He told me about his marriage, his divorce, his Match dates. He lost his father recently after a hard fight for his health, and lost his brother as a young man. I was vibing off the guy because I am not a stranger to loss, and some of our histories were paralleling. It was one of those mirror-like moments that could be construed as meant to be, God sent. If I hadn’t known from previous dating that first-hour gushing is a red flag, I would have fallen in love with him on the spot. Handsome, gentle, and deeply in touch as he was.

Then he kind of stuttered. “When—How long—have you been single?”

“Several years,” I said.

“That’s hard to believe,” he said.

Interrogation

I smiled at him. I figured the comment to be a compliment. It’s a standard come on guys use; if you’re single you’ve heard it. But he wasn’t complimenting me. His face was focused. I got nervous, like I was on an interview: “Shit, there’s a gap in my resume!”

I stuttered and stumbled, stacking thought onto thought while saying to myself, “He’s gonna think I am emotionally stunted. He’ll assume there’s something wrong with me, single this long!”

It occurred to me for half a second that I was firmly at choice in the matter of relationship in my life. But, that awareness got buried by the bare light bulb shining in my face and the dim, dank interrogation room—

He interrupted my imagination. “How many years?”

I paused. And then decided to go deep, too. “What do you really want to know?”

He kind of laughed. “I guess, I just wonder what you have been doing all this time?”

DOING??

What was I supposed to have been doing? Sleeping with someone else in particular? Getting married? Having someone else’s kids? Getting divorced to get to this point? Creating a train wreck? Like a good young woman on track for success and happiness?

It struck me that if I had been happily in love and successful at it, I wouldn’t be here on this date with him. So, here I am, already a failure. And yet, since I had not been spending my years in marital bliss and mopping up after its subsequent destruction, I was somehow an emotional pygmy who hadn’t met the relationship pre-requisites for a woman of my age.

And he aimed to know this based on the bullet points of my relationship history, related in the time it took to get from restaurant to parking lot.

“I…have moved around a lot,” I said.

Chicken

I drove home. Thinking.

Did geographical gypsy-hood metastasize to my heart? Am I single because I am restless and moving all the time? Or am I restless and moving because I’m single? Am I a chicken?

God help me I’m a chicken.

I turned off the jazz station close to the end of my drive, and heard the echo of what had been playing: “You’re nobody till somebody loves you…”

Mr. Deep, the Interrogator, didn’t want to know who I was in that moment. He focused instead on what I had missed out on while spending all those years “alone.” He made that who I was.

I think if he calls me again, I’ll ask for his ex-wife’s number, in an effort to get to know him, and go out with her instead.

. . . . . . .

Photo courtesy of eyeliam