Starting Again

I find myself in a frenzy, putting pencil eyeliner on my eyebrows instead of the brown brow pencil. Scrubbing it off with a cotton ball and moisturizer, not wanting to wash my face and have to redo my eye liner.

What is going on? My heart beating faster, pulling out different shirts and rethinking my planned outfit.

I am not 14 and yet the frenetic energy of meeting a new man in a new place with the words ‘online dating’ attached to it brings back every bad date I’ve ever been on – and there were many.

• The one who picked his teeth after dinner with a drinking straw.
• The one who made racist and anti-Semitic comments while alleging to be neither a racist or anti-Semite.
• The one who though I should pay for his dinner to make up for all the dinners he’d paid for and not gotten his ‘due’ as he put it.
• The one who posted a 20-year old picture of himself on his website.

I am, as usual, thirty minutes early for where I need to be. I walk around the town, practicing slow breathing, my walking meditation, reminding myself this is one of the 52 I plan to go on. One date each week for a year. What have I to lose?