Everything spins
I left out of the house this morning to go on our first MS 150 practice ride and my mind was spinning with competing images, thoughts, and musings. Riding to meet a familiar group – we all rode last year together – and yet I’m changed so completely. It was last year at the bike ride that rustlings began – there was the mesmerizing man who was emotionally unavailable – the unavailable but emotionally charged woman – and then there was me.
When the weekend was over, a friend asked me how it went with the mesmerizer and I said candidly I had never been more myself, more comfortable in my own skin, more true to me than during this bike ride. Why, she asked, what was different? And I told her I was happy where I was in life, I was out in nature, with a bunch of women I loved to hang out with, riding my bike that I love, the weather had been perfect, and that night we had a roaring fire, delicious wines, and conversation beside the lake in the forested primitive campground. I told her if he didn’t fall in love with me that weekend – he never would.
But I didn’t tell her about what happened on the way home from that weekend – a twist that caught me off guard – I found myself attracted to a woman for the first time in my life – not sexually, I’ve always been bisexual – but attracted from the point where I wanted to spend time with her like you would with a lover and not someone who you considered just a friend. I didn’t tell her about the woman because she was in a relationship and although she seemed to be emotionally available, she was in reality not.
Flash forward to this morning, leaving my house, a woman I love kissing me good bye as I headed out for my “sporty” ride with the girls and I marveled at how things can change so vastly in less than six months in your life. I went from trying to figure out why the mesmerizer (who had all of these things on my check list) left me emotionally numb, to wondering how I could possibly find myself entangled in another potentially lethal relationship triangle to meeting the love of my life. WOW. Now, that is living – as my friend in SF wrote to me recently.
But what is interesting is that today after the ride – with the same group of people – all of them the same as who they were six months ago – when I said in jest “I am what I am” and the woman asked, “And who is that?” – I said simply “R” – a joke on first gloss, but in reality not – I am that person on the bike ride six months ago – the fiercely independent, passionate, fun loving woman who the man couldn’t see, the woman couldn’t see clearly, and who the love of my life spotted from a crowd of Mardi Gras revelers.
Now that is living.