Reviewing the Game Films

And in between the fiasco that was J., after which I spent months stomping out embers that he kept trying to rekindle flames from, and which ended in a bizarre confrontation during which he unveiled the ill-advised and unauthorized tattoo of my face on his leg, and me calling the police and the locksmith, there was yet another well-timed trip West with The Girls wherein I again got my Girl on, and got happy, but did not come home and slip into morbid depression.

No, that time, I found Scott.

I had met - or rather, re-met - a guy named Alejandro on the trip West and he'd been good for me.  Flirted with me, danced with me, asked to take me to his house in South Florida for a little getaway.  He was wildly successful and loads of fun to be around.  A good guy, with good friends. You do the math. Where's the negative? I came home feeling all fabulous and full of myself.

But as they usually do, things faded away pretty quickly after we all returned home from the surreal suspended animation that is vacation to the harsh reality that is Life. And work. And Winter weather and Christmas shopping and the usual family harangue. Alejandro and I talked a few times. Texted a few times. Made some tentative plans to get together that never really materialized. And then nothing.

But somewhere as things faded to black Scott had Friended me on Facebook, and that was a new distraction. A sudden buoyancy when I was sinking.

I think we've adequately covered where things went from there: zero to sixty in a matter of days. We were madly in love. Even as we still got to know each other as the adults we'd become, scarred and weathered and molded by our respective life experiences.

And as they say, love is indeed blind. Because perhaps had I been looking a little harder or listening a little more closely, I would have seen and heard things that I would have questioned. Things that would have moved a check from the Plus column to the Minus column, or at least to the Not Entirely Sure What To Think About That column.

Or maybe not.

Were there signs that Scott would turn out to be the kind of man who just vanishes from a relationship without so much as an argument, a discussion, an explanation, a confession?  Did I miss some huge, critical monkey wrench along the 27 point pre-flight inspection that would have given me some clue, some warning light that we would have an engine failure and plummet from space unexpectedly?

Pondering again. Like the unemployed are apt to do.