It's been a long time.

I had essentially shut off that side of my life, the romantic side, first as a reaction to a broken heart, though it mostly just stayed that way out of neglect. I suppose it's not really one of those things you can force. The fact was, no one ever entered my life that lit a fire under me in any appreciable way, not like the last one. Not until now.

Living a life without prospect of romance is a stable but uninteresting experience. It's like the difference between the rides at the park for the people there to play and the people accompanying the people there to play. The kids go to ride on rollercoasters and tilt-a-whirls, and the adults get on the scenic rides, the train that goes around the park or the aerial lift that takes you over it. The whole thing is predictable and slow, and there's something to be said for that. But it can crush your soul if that's all you have.

And so you -- or, really, I -- seek it out, but it's nowhere to be found. I guess I had the classic post-heartbreak problem, which is that I was really just looking for Her all over again, and the fact is, she picked the other guy. Hell, she married him. There's no going back. But she embodied what I was looking for, and nothing that had come into my field of influence gave me anything near the same rush. I tried. I guess you can call what I did trying. I threw myself into whatever relationship was available to me at the time to no avail. Maybe, as they say ("them" being your parents, or, more likely, your parents' parents) love is something that has to grow, because passion is fleeting. And that's undoubtedly why divorce rates are so high, not because people are more fickle necessarily, but because they are less likely to recognize that sort of dogma for the bullshit that it is. But I digress.

The point I was trying to make is I had basically let a side of me atrophy, and it's the side that makes things interesting, that motivates you to do something besides accumulate. And yesterday, I had a glimpse of what I was missing, and it damn near killed me.

I mean, further bludgeoning the amusement park metaphor I mentioned before, imagine taking a sabbatical to sit and meditate on a mountain for four years and then coming back to civilization and immediately climbing on the Screaming Coaster of Death. Your heart would explode, and they'd have to stop the ride to clean the car you were sitting in.

Though that's not entirely accurate. It was more like I'd just seen the coaster, and wanted to ride it so bad that my adrenal gland gave me a good, hard slap any time I thought of it. See, I went on this date, and the thing is, I had completely not anticipated reacting the way I did. It's something like going into a movie your friend has told you is going to be crap, but it turns out your friend just has horrible taste. Your expectations are so skewed that you wind up having a different experience than if you'd gone in uncorrupted. And it's not that I'd heard bad things about her, or anything remotely like that, it's just that the phone conversations hadn't completely lit my toes on fire, and owing to a recent incident where my expectations had been low and the actual event had turned out even worse, I was low-balling it here. And my conversations with her weren't bad, per se, we were just missing that face-to-face aspect that allows a conversation to go much smoother than they ever could on a cell phone.

The problem has never been my communication skills, I've always had complete confidence in those (perhaps to the point of having too much confidence, but let's just move on), but my own self-confidence in my past and my physique and whatever else I seem to believe goes into the equation for members of the opposite sex. (Ignoring that I have no idea if those components actually do or not, but I have to take my best guess, don't I?) So when I saw her and she was tan and beautiful and tall (deliciously tall), my heart sank and my palms started to sweat. I remember noticing her lips first: They were luscious and covered in this gorgeous lipstick that sparkled just a bit in the early evening light from the street. I immediately felt pale and gawky and I was certain she'd see right through me or fixate on my all-too visible flaws.

She did not flee, though, and I was faced with the daunting prospect of not immediately proving my unworthiness. I leaned on my strengths: my somewhat quick wit and my erudition, which is not so much deep as broad. I figured that if I kept her laughing, she might not notice my hairline. And then she really twisted the knife. This girl, as it turns out, is not just pretty, but smart and fun. She listened to my stories, even the dopey ones with no point, much better than I'm sure I did to hers, though I hope she took my probably too-frequent interruptions not for rudeness but for extreme interest.

While we clearly had different tastes in a lot of places (she, for instance, has given up TV, which would probably result in a severe case of DTs for me), our upbringing and experiences actually overlapped in a wide variety of places. She laughed at most of my jokes, and I marveled at her varied stories of her life. We had gourmet chicken pizza and beer, and then a split a cookie. She solved the first of two real uncertainties of the evening by suggesting that we check out the book store across the street after all the food and drink had been downed. I took it as a good sign that she didn't bolt immediately after the check had been paid. (For the record, I insisted on footing the bill, as is my wont. Some women will make motions about paying, but then grumble about the gent's cheapness later; I figure it's best just to remove all doubt.) We wandered the aisles for a while, and I tried to keep up with her clearly voracious reading appetite. I lack serious literary depth when it comes to fiction and poetry, two things clearly close to her heart, but I think I scored bonus points by at least having heard of most of the books and authors she mentioned.

And the whole time, I kept thinking, dammit, this is good. I'm so lucky to be here. This is, I think, the exact opposite of what all the magazines tell you is the key to successfully enticing a woman. The vibe you're supposed to provide is that she's lucky to be with you. Frankly, I'm just not that good of an actor.

After we'd poked around a good portion of the book store, she started suggesting that she was exhausted from a long day at work, and to top things off, the cable guy was coming early tomorrow to install her new 'net connection. It was, she said, probably time to go our separate ways. (Only then did it occur to me that it probably would have been wise to have had a few alternatives at hand for post-dinner activities, but I hadn't thought that far ahead. Now it was clearly a moot point.) Though the paranoid side in me would probably like to think she was using all this as an excuse to cut things off, I am inclined to believe that she was telling the truth, if only for the bookstore jaunt, which was obviously more beyond the scope of the dinner and drinks that she had contracted for. I have to take that as a good sign.

As we walked to her car, she gave me what seemed like more good signs: She said that she'd had a good time, and that she was glad to have met someone intelligent. I complimented her back, and then the second moment of uncertainty came for me, and for her as well, I suppose. There moment came when I suppose things could have headed for a kiss, but I didn't feel it appropriate, the mood was off. Or maybe I'm just a chicken. I was babbling something about being off balance on the uneven sidewalk, and she seized on my apparent discomfort to give me a hug. It was sweet and certainly more than I was expecting.

I went home (okay, actually over to a friend's for debriefing) as happy as a goon. I can't remember feeling that giddy in ages, probably years now. I wanted to act on it, do something spontaneous and romantic, but not too forward, for fear of coming off as desperate or overeager. I wasn't, for instance, about to send her a dozen red roses, a move which would have likely been complicated by not knowing her last name. She had, however, told me of how she was reading "Love in the Time of Cholera," and I had in turn told her about a very funny Steve Martin essay that dealt that same book. As luck would have it, it was published all over the Internet, so I decided to use sending her that link as an excuse to e-mail her and tell her about how good a time I had with her.

I have not, however, heard back from her, which just brings back all those paranoia demons. She had, as you may recall, used the installation of Internet service as a reason for ending things relatively early, so it's doubtful that she didn't get the e-mail, right? Was it just too goofy? Too much too soon? Too much, period? Of course, there's absolutely no way to know, but my brain likes to mess with me, so all those possibilities and worse had already gone through my head after about an hour or two. Suddenly, the hug seemed like a brush-off, the "intelligent" comment a sure-fire sign of my impending retirement to The Friend Zone, and her "early" departure as a reminder of all my flaws. Of course, it's too early to say any of that, but I think I must regard happiness with immediate suspicion, perhaps because it's been so foreign lately. I'm sure that this reaction is just human nature, though it's up for debate how much of it is "healthy."

I don't know about any of that, but what I do know is that I really, really would love to see her again, and that sort of desire surely sets you up for more of a fall than, say, preferring someone's company to being force-fed dirt clods. Wanting something, especially something so powerful, surely requires a lot of risk, and that's scary, but it also holds the potential for a lot of payoff. It's the rollercoaster all over again. When I was younger, my friends and I used to chant "derail, derail" to taunt the weaker-stomached among us. Of course, I had little or no concept of what that really meant, it just seemed funny and daring. Now, though, I know exactly what happens when the ride goes awry, and how long it can take to gain the will to ride again after something like that.

The possibility frightens the hell out of me, yes, but that's part of the rush, isn't it? And what a rush, man. What a rush.