Page 1 of Sunsets & Slow Dances

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NADIA

No drinking.No dating. No dick.

Today was the first day of the new year, and I was taking Dry January to a whole new level. Instead of the traditional one-month abstinence, I was taking a year-long sabbatical from my chosen vices. In addition to cutting out alcohol, I was going to practice sexual sobriety as well as relationship-seeking sobriety. I’d always heard of ‘the power of three’ or ‘the rule of three,’ and I decided to go big or go home. I wasn’t sure why that number held such significance, but I needed all the help and good juju I could get.

One might argue that dating and dick were the same thing, but they were not. I’d been on plenty of dates where a dick was not involved, and I had had a few intimate times when there was no wining and dining prior to my close encounter of the D kind. So, my resolutions stood.

Eager to get my intentions in tangible form, I picked up my dry erase marker attached by string to the whiteboard mounted beside my refrigerator. Typically, I used the board to jot down what I needed from the grocery store or reminders for upcomingappointments, but now it was going to have a multi-purpose use. It would be my vision board.

After removing the cap, I spoke each one of my new rules aloud, “No drinking. No dating. No dick.”

Once I finished writing my rules, I put the cap back on and leaned against the kitchen counter. I slowly inhaled through my nose and exhaled through my mouth, doing my level best not to empty the contents of my stomach into the original farmhouse sink.

As I stood concentrating on my breathing, my entire body ached like I had contracted the bubonic plague. My legs were wobbly and weak. One second my mouth was drier than the Sahara Desert, and the next, a wave of nausea crashed over me, and it would fill with water like a dam burst, signifying I was about to puke. My head felt like my big toe the time I stubbed it on a brick wall when Cody “The Cootie Monster” Crawley was chasing me in the first grade trying to kiss me; it throbbed, radiating with pain.

The first of my ‘magic three’ resolutions was born purely out of self-preservation because at the ripe old age of thirty-two, like Danny Glover’s character Roger Murtaugh inLethal Weapon—which, for the record,isa Christmas movie—“I’m too old for this shit.”

Last night, I hit rock bottom, and now I was determined to eliminate the three things in my life that no longer served me. I was going cold turkey on every behavior that contributed to the hallucination that had shaken me to my core, the vision that had sent me into a spiral of anxiety, the apparition that sucker punched me and knocked the wind right out of me—my sighting of The Ghost of Exes Past. The man who, when I was twelve years old, stole my heart on the Firefly pier with a package of Big League Chew bubble gum, and never bothered to give it back.

I probably wouldn’t be so upset by my delusion if it hadn’t seemedsoreal. If I closed my eyes now, I could still see him. Thick chestnut brown hair, chocolate brown eyes, a broad chest, tattooed forearms peeking out of a long sleeve thermal shirt and a strong jaw peppered with a five o’clock shadow; six foot two inches of chiseled Adonis perfection.

Last night, I was minding my own business, enjoying the night out, when I glanced across the bar seconds before the clock struck midnight and saw Callum Knight in all his sexy glory. Then I blinked, and he was gone. Poof. Vanished into thin air. After recovering from the shock, I quickly realized it was a figment of my overactive imagination. Sure, it was a very hot, very sexy figment—but a figment, nonetheless.

Callum Knight hadn’t stepped foot in Firefly Island in over a decade since the day we broke up for good. If he were back in our small island hometown, I would be the first to know. And I hadn’t heard a peep. Sure, I’d been out of town over Christmas on my annual ski trip to the Catskills, which I took every year, so my friends didn’t feel obligated to invite me to their holiday celebrations since I was single, with no family to speak of. But I got back to town yesterday afternoon in time to get ready for my NYE date, which I spent at Southern Comfort, the sole bar in Firefly, with my three besties and their significant others—not to mention half the town.

So, again, if Callum Knight were back in Firefly, someone would have clued me in on his arrival. Which meant my mind was playing tricks on me. Dirty, rotten, cruel tricks. Was I six vodka sodas and three shots deep when I saw him? Yes. But unlike Jamie Fox’s 2010 summer anthem, I was not blaming my midnight mirage on the alcohol. Or at least not totally on the alcohol. Which was why I was cutting allthreeof the contributing factors to my delusional imaginings out of my life.

After a fearless inventory this morning, I realized I’d wasted so much time over the past decade dedicated to meeting ‘the one’ that my brain was inventing fabricated scenarios that I’d imagined happening. I was starting to believe the things I’d hoped for. Not in the manifesting sense, in the fit-her-for-a-straitjacket sense. It was my own fault. I only had myself to blame.

Which brought me to number two on my list. If I added up all the time I’d spent thinking about men, texting men, waiting for men to respond, analyzing their messages when they did respond, signing up for apps, spending time on apps, going through photos on apps, matching with men on apps, chatting with men I’d matched with, DMing men, responding to men who slid into my DMs, planning dates, getting ready for dates, going on dates, and going on weekends away, it added up to roughly more than six weeks out of the last year. Six. Weeks. That’s 42 days, or 1,008 hours, or 60,480 minutes.

Any way you break it down—weeks, days, hours, or minutes—it was a lot of time. When I thought of all the things I could have done in that time, it made me even sicker to my stomach than I already was.

I’d always wanted to learn another language. According to the experts, it takes 480 hours to reach a novice proficiency level of a language and 2,400 hours to reach an advanced proficiency level. I could have reached intermediate proficiency level. Instead, I had a lot of boring interactions, a few funny anecdotes, a handful of horror stories, and a drained bank account.

Time wasn’t the only thing wasted; there was the money I’d spent. Besides the dating sites I’d joined, there were the clothes, the gas to get to wherever the dates were, the activities, the drinks, the dinners, and the trips. Typically on first and second dates, I went Dutch. And since I hadn’t made it to many third dates, my bank balance had taken a hit. Which was not greatconsidering the farmhouse I lived in was built over a hundred years ago, and even after being here for two years and investing fifty grand into updates and repairs; it still needed close to twenty grand in renovations. Which I calculated I’d spent close to that amount on my social life this year. The long weekend away I spent in the Bahamas with a guy I dated for two months cost me five grand when he “lost” his wallet, and I had to put the hotel on my credit card and pay for our meals.

So, that explained why I was giving up the first two D’s of, drinking, dating, and dick. As far as the third D, physical touch had always been my love language. Some people got their love tanks filled by spending quality time with people. Others felt seen and valued when they received gifts. There were those who found themselves fulfilled when people did things for them in acts of service. Some were recharged by being told how beautiful, smart, witty, brave, kind, or generous they were in words of affirmation. I’d always found that my Energizer Bunny battery ran on touch, not just any touch, the touch of someone who stimulated all of the attraction simulators in my brain. So, there had been times I’d hooked up with people, not because I’d been interested in having any sort of relationship with them per se, but more because I’d just needed to feel close to another person. I needed intimacy to get my fix. My love language fix. It was an addiction, which was very unhealthy.

I only minored in psych, but it tracked that touch would be my love language since I came from a single-parent home with a mom who was not only emotionally distant, she also never hugged me. Not once. The other parental figure in my life was my grandfather, who left me the house I was living in when he passed two years ago. He helped raise me and was a hardworking, honest man, but he came from the old-school way of thinking. He believed men didn’t talk about their feelings andcertainly didn’t show their feelings by being overly affectionate or affectionate at all.

Not that I was complaining. He wasn’t a bad man; he was just emotionally unavailable. He’d raised my mother as a single father, and I’m sure there was generational trauma from her not having a mother, which was passed down to me. She didn’t know how to be nurturing or caring. She never once told me she loved me or made me a lunch to take to school. Even in kindergarten, I washed my own clothes, packed my own lunches, and walked to school.

My phone dinged, and I looked down to see that I had matched with someone on Cupid Connect. It was one of a half dozen dating sites I was signed up to. Being the hopeless romantic I was had its pros and cons. The pros were that I continued to have blind faith that I would find someone. The con was the six weeks I’d wasted in one year in my fruitless pursuit.

I picked up my device and deleted all six of the dating apps from it. I didn’t even care that I still had months that I’d paid for and was ‘wasting’ that money. I needed to go cold turkey. For the next three hundred and sixty-four days, I was going to be living a life of sexual sobriety, relationship-seeking sobriety, and substance sobriety.

New Year. New Me. I set my phone down, and there was a loud knock on the door followed by barking.

“Peanut, shh.” My four-year-old fawn pug rushed to the front door, the one male in my life who had never disappointed me. His nails clicked on the original hardwood flooring as he tapped loudly at whoever dared to stand on the porch.

Jelly, my five-year-old calico cat who was sunbathing on the back of the couch that sat along the front bay window, stretched her legs out in front of her and rolled over as she let out a low growl expressing her irritation at the noise. Her sister Butter, who was perched on the top of the cat tree in the front room,ignored her brother’s battle- bark cry entirely. The only sign she’d even heard him was the flattening of her ears against her head and an irritated flick of her tail.

As I passed by the mirror hanging in the entryway, I did a double take. My long blonde hair was a tangled mess piled on top of my head, which was ironic since the first graders I taught often compared me to Rapunzel from the movieTangled. The smoky eye I’d applied to go out and ring in the New Year had now migrated south, and it looked like I’d gone a few rounds in the ring and come out with two shiners. My naturally ivory complexion had turned paper-thin and white. Forget a Disney princess; I looked more like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

I opened the door and immediately regretted not donning sunglasses before doing so. I lifted my hand to block the glare as I hissed at the sting. Maybe I wasn’t a ghost; perhaps I was a vampire because the sun was definitely burning my eyes.

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