roses, or, thoughts come creeping in

I had dinner this past Friday with an old high school friend whom I had not seen in quite a few years. We spent a lovely couple of hours in a cozy little restaurant, warm and dry and glowing on a rainy, windy night, caught up in catching up over delicious pasta (mine, rigatoni with eggplant, tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella; his, spaghetti lamb ragu) and a bottle of tempranillo.

Both of us being single at the moment, we found ourselves trading war stories. His most recent break-up actually involved Facebook, and this singlehandedly made me feel exponentially better about that whole getting dumped over the phone thing that was the tip of the iceberg of my last (well, truth be told, my only) break-up.

It also got me to thinking about these last two years of semi-intentional self-imposed solitude. I don't consider myself gun-shy, exactly, when it comes to the idea of dating again. But the three individuals with whom I've hooked up since the break-up (and I use "hooked up" here in the most innocent, chaste fashion -- drunken kisses at the end of long dinners; stolen moments on street corners thousands of miles away from home) have been, each in his or her own way, studies in unavailability.

I can't help but wonder if this has been my not so subtle way of telling myself I haven't been ready. And yet the notion of meeting someone new has started, however unbidden, to crop up every now and again. A friend was telling me today how her husband surprised her recently with a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. While we agreed that roses aren't exactly our thing, and I don't particularly want a husband, I'd kind of sort of maybe like for someone to bring me a dozen purple, yellow-tongued irises. At least I wouldn't be entirely averse to the idea.