Taking it Easy With My Heart

I’m wearing a dress.

My knees are pudgy, my legs aren’t as smooth as they could be. I’m sitting spread eagled on my bed, the fan on my laptop whirling along to the tunes  of my Spotify playlist. Coffee in hand. While life isn’t perfect, it certainly ain’t fucking bad either.

I am thinking of a boy though. A boy who is just that. A boy.  He will be my lesson. Correction, he IS my lesson. One final lesson in taking things easy with my heart and sticking to standards I long abandoned in dating about a bajillion years ago. Standards that were meant to protect me, but only served as reminders after the fact. Almost always.

Often in dating I am that awkward teenager still sussing things out and trying to figure out what I deserve, all the while competing with what my actual 40-something self is demanding. You deserve better. You know you deserve better. Why do you keep falling for these teenage games of ‘he loves you, he loves you not’ and worse still, why do you hang on when you know YOU don’t want him?

Sometimes my heart is sensible, but often it’s not. So this year I vowed to take it easy. Something I haven’t been doing. But I’ve learned better. He is my lesson.