A Loss of Time

In ADD land, time has little meaning. I was thinking about this last night as I sat surfing the web mindlessly and aimlessly, after swimming and downing the usual shake and fries with my pseudo-boyfriend. I've decided that, right now, he's my best bet in the dating hell I live in. While his touch does not really turn me on, he is patient and lets me be me.

The jock-jerk emailed the other day and said he was out at clubs roving for chicks. What I find entirely comical (or hypocritical) about this is that he is a "devout Catholic." I am assuming he means he's a bad ass in real life and cleanses his sins by going into the confessional once a week. "Sorry Father, for I have sinned and slept with a dozen different women while making each believe I was exclusive with her. Let me say the Hail Mary three times."

There is plenty to not celebrate these days, including my Internet-at-night relapse. By the time I shut down at night, it is close to 1 a.m. and the next morning I am scrambling to get the day's ignition started. I once bought a magazine rack and threw everything from keys to shoes to the morning energy bar in there, but somehow I lost interest in that rack and now it’s filled with knickknacks.

The pseudo-boyfriend is kind and forgiving. He seemed close to tears (I've only seen a man cry once and it sent shivers up my spine) when I talked about my absentee mother. I feel that at some point I will feel comfortable enough to tell him about my skeletons. Who knows, maybe my notion of love has been tainted by movies like "Titanic" and "Gone with the Wind."

I am a hopeless romantic, and gaze longingly still at the high-rise where the womanizer of an ex-boyfriend lived. I think about better days—red wine on a snowy slope overlooking a frozen lake with a purple glow on the horizon. I think to a more robust stock market and economy. Somehow, seemingly overnight, the world has shifted and changed into something unrecognizable.

The only time I am happy is in the swimming lane, and enveloped in a chlorine-induced haze. I sometimes wish that life were as set and straightforward as the black line on the bottom of the pool.

I often wish that life—with all its unpredictability and curve balls—were as set as the start and end of a workout. That those we loved would love us back equally, that there was no disease and pain, and that the time line of everyone's life were the same.

Maybe this is a bit of daydreaming at a time when the stock index has shed some 40 percent from a year ago, when wealth on paper has been lost, when a man who seemed so perfect and handsome at the outset left me bitter and oddly brokenhearted.

"You can't do anything about it, so don't worry," a colleague says, and he's right. Sometimes it's best to surrender.