Hi Jacked

Needing something to do while I figured out my next career, I took a job waiting tables at a local restaurant. I had waited tables in college, and was pretty good at it. Besides, it got me out of the house for 6 hours at a time.

My first day, I saw her... from behind.

She was tall, amazonian, with long, long blonde hair.
I recognized her walk. It was the same confident, sensual walk I knew so many years ago.

I thought I was seeing a ghost.

As she turned around, my mind raced back to the delusions... could they have been real?

No.

May would have aged. This girl was still young, 19 years old.
She looked enough like May to make pursuing her my only option. My internal throttle was already locked. I had no choice.

As time would reveal, she had issues of her own that would make dating a man almost twice her age seem normal. I didn't care. I wasn't dating her.

I was dating May.

She wasn't May. She was her own young woman, with her own personality, her own problems, her own life.

Try as I might, I couldn't conform her into my version of what May had been. There was no way she could. No real, flesh and blood human woman could, even if she had wanted to.

The following year was wasted on drama, false expectations, and disappointments.
She was a good girl. Pretty, smart, caring, determined... and a little troubled.

Had I not been living out some fantasy, I might have seen her for what she was.

A good woman with some problems she would need to solve for herself.
Someone who might have come to love me, if I had allowed myself to see her for her.

Ultimately, she realized that I could not love her, because I had never bothered to know her.

She left.

I was bitter. Not for losing her, but for not getting it right my second time around.

She came into my life, then left.

And I was unchanged by the experience.