Sometimes, things just... work.
After deciding to give up, I get online and fish one more time, send one more message... this man is younger than me, and if the last one hadn't chased me so hard to get me to date someone younger than myself, I would never have bothered.
He lives nearby me, but happens to be interstate for work, so there is nothing to do but talk on the phone, no way to make the same mistakes I have before and allow that physical desire- skin hunger- to creep it's way in before I know him, before he knows me.
He has children the same age as mine, and, having lost before, he understands grief... When I think back to the psychic I saw so long ago, just after Tony passed away, and I reread my own wish to the universe... something there seems to click, and there's an electricity in the air.
He makes me laugh, and I find myself on the phone to him for literally hours, going to bed later and later and not feeling the lack of sleep as I usually would. Time becomes jelly and shift shapes... days run faster or slower, and I begin to get a feeling of surreality waiting for him to get back to Sydney.
He's secure and strong and knows himself... he's different to anyone I've met so far. And he's not scared of me... he's not afraid of what happened to me. He can listen to me speak Tony's name, and it doesn't bother him, doesn't make him jealous, if I love him, mourn for him, mention him.
He reads my blog, and that doesn't scare him either. He's not ashamed of me, he's proud of me... he even shows his mum. Which would be totally awesome, except for the fact that the leading post on the day she first begins reading is called Vagina, and it stays up all weekend.
For lack of a better name, while I get him figured out, we'll call him the Enigma, because that seems to fit. He amazes me more and more, as he Googles me and it still doesn't scare him. He finds me on YouTube and then makes his only mini vlogs to send me when I complain that watching video footage tips the scales of this dating thing in his favour. He plasters me all over his FaceBook without stopping to think that anyone might worry for him, being so into someone into as obviously broken as me.
But no one does, of course, and this is further proof I worry too much.
The feeling of surreality and anticipation... that electricity in the air. It grows, ferments and charges, as he makes his way back across borders, does what he needs to do before he can get to me.
Things may just begin all over again on Sunday... as usual, my lovely jellybean voyeurs, I'll let you know how it goes.
***
That electricity, that feeling of things building up... it was all through the air, running through it so thick it may have as well have been colored, in the weeks leading up to Tony's death. At first I thought it was just the excitement of small children and Christmas, maybe looking forward to the pumping hedonism of New Years' Ever, but those things came and went, and that electricity remained. The palatable feeling that something, something big, was about to happen. That a storm was gathering and it would break soon.
I wasn't the only one who felt it. I know other people did too, and in hindsight it seems so easy for them to say that they know. But only my mother and my mate Emma, they were the only ones brave enough to verbalise it. Emma, bloody optimist that she is- and I adore that about her- she thought it was the lead up to something great. I was never so sure. It seemed to be all about death, a looming shadow of something.
"Don't you remember? I didn't think you would, and I didn't want to mention it till now. But it was all I could think about after Tony died- you knew. Remember? You said to me, when you left my house, just days before it all happened, you said 'If I die tonight, update my blog for me- tell people it was the little ghost girl who haunts the mountain that made me crash!'. We were so close..."
After she tells me, I do remember, that one sentence, making fun of an old local rumor, said completely in jest just ten months ago by a different person, a different Lori. Maybe we were close... not close enough.
But maybe it was better that way.