What The Jigsaw Puzzle On My Dining Table Says About My Love Life 🧩
Too Independent To Date, But Trying
Dear Wonderful Readers,
The following vignette is what we call a “raw write.” I wrote it in 40 minutes in my writing class called UnMute, led by my incredible writing teacher,
. I've been attending Ann's classes for the last three and a half years, and working with her has been a huge part of my creative journey. She'll be starting up UnMute again in the fall for any of you who have a lot of stories bubbling away inside of you but are unsure of where to start. I highly recommend her class.Today’s prompt was the poem “What The Living Do” by Marie Howe, and I took the question: “Write about something broken in your home—something small and stupid. Let the description grow. What bigger thing does it mirror or hold? What grief or yearning lives inside that broken faucet, that squeaky hinge?”
Also, I’ve got an exciting and quick Misseducated update. Starting this week, I will be experimenting with posting my work on Tuesdays. I've tended to publish too late on Friday evening, and I hope that publishing earlier in the week will give me more opportunities to share my work on social while it's still fresh. Still, I am eternally grateful to all my regular Friday readers, and I will keep you in the loop as to how it goes! You can expect posts from me on Tuesday from now on.
I hope you enjoy this piece and have a great weekend.
Love,
Tash
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What The Jigsaw Puzzle On My Dining Table Says About My Love Life 🧩 👩❤️💋👨
I have a giant jigsaw puzzle sitting on my dining room table. It takes up all the space I could use for dinners with friends. I planned to have it glued together and framed ages ago at this point. I haven’t broken it apart yet because it took me so long to put it together. My sister gave that jigsaw puzzle to me because my family always said I was good at them, and I do like them, but this one was quite hard, with all the pieces looking the same, so I can’t just destroy it. I’m going to make my time worth it and stick it together so that I never have to redo it again.
A guy (José) I am seeing came round the other day. He offered to have one of his guys come over and frame my puzzle for me. My sense of overwhelm at having the puzzle on my table for months was lifted slightly before the guilt of relying on another person to sort out my life clocked me around the head. He is sweet and generous enough. He has black whiskers on his chin, with a couple of grey ones in there, too, and deep brown eyes. When I am with him, it feels like the most natural thing ever. I don’t have to pretend to be somebody else. We snuggle mere hours into knowing each other. I’m still not convinced, but I kind of like it that way.
What I wanted was a boyfriend, swiping through the apps. Hinge. Bumble. Hinge. Luxxy. Raya. Hinge. Bumble. Feeld. Coffee Meets Bagel. Until I thought about it the other day. How many men and women have I swiped on? Hundreds of thousands of people at this point. I started using the apps over a decade ago, when I was a fresh little spring chicken, not even close to fully adulting, at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve swiped through so many people my thumbs have begged me to stop from their aching long ago.
Deep in the bowels of these people’s profiles, what was I really looking for? The Prince Charming on a white horse. The Harvard graduate with lots of money. The perfect match that I couldn’t even describe to you because this human person does not even exist. All the fish pictures, dog pictures, graduation pictures, sky diving pictures, waterfall pictures, random group of men at weddings pictures, in bed with a cat pictures, with parents pictures, now nieces and nephews pictures. All just churning like thick buttercream in a barrel into one giant blob. An indecipherable mess of the reason why I can’t get laid and yet also some sort of cultural observation with data points and trends and themes that I should have sat down and started to track ages ago. At least that might have resulted in something interesting. I don’t want to accept the lost time. These are puzzles that I can’t break apart even when they’re not working.
But recently, I realized that a good chunk of my close friends are leaving town, and social events are winding down, so maybe this is a good time to try my hand at the cultural phenomenon they call “a relationship.” It’s been quite interesting to try to take down the barriers in my mind and my life to enable myself to let this phenomenon in, one brick at a time. I started to notice things about my lifestyle. I am too independent. I bike to the date on the shared city bike system rather than letting the guy pick me up from my house and drive me. I walk home alone, quite enjoying the peace of my own company on the dark, wet nights of Mexico City when the kind man with the deep brown eyes has offered to call me an Uber. I won’t get on his motorcycle because he only has one helmet, and I’m not an idiot, but that means I am cold, and I run home in the rain feeling a bit sick because we just ate a lovely ramen dinner that he paid for and wouldn’t even let me look at the check. But the idea of getting on a motorcycle terrifies me anyway. It’s a funny thing, you know, letting yourself be taken care of. Maybe this is what a relationship is.
The older man with the deep brown eyes messages me on WhatsApp and calls me “guapa” and “hermosa.” He says he can’t wait to take me out for dinner again. We did a spin class together as a joke. Every time before I see him, I feel nervous because I fear I will hate him. But when I see him again, my heart softens, and I remember that he is kind of cute. And I let him put his motorcycle helmet and his backpack in my locker at the spin class gym and I wonder to myself. Maybe this is modern dating. Maybe this is what a relationship is. We speak in Spanish, which goes against my strong principle of only dating people in English since my last partner, and I think to myself. Why do I make up these silly rules? Perhaps they only exist to be broken anyway.
I do not probe into his past yet or whether he wants children because I do not want or need to know these things yet, either. He is too kind, too soft, maybe, to spank me when I pull back my dress to reveal my pale thigh in the fluorescent light of his apartment. He doesn’t want to hurt me. I wonder if his tenderness is a sign of weakness or a sign of strength. If this makes him less or more of a man than the string of people I have been with. It may not be very hot or erotic, but what about feeling safe? I let him sit on my right side on our second date at dinner, the side where I have an eternity of ugly trauma stored in my body, the side that alerts me to danger without me even knowing it while I’m asleep in the middle of the night. With him, I feel nothing. No alarm bells. No fear. Just peace. That’s got to count for something, hasn’t it?
He messages me in the middle of the day. How am I? He messages me in the evening. Have I eaten? Am I hungry? Can he send some food to my apartment? He is very sweet, but I know better than to accept such generosities, too tied up in my own spiral of being an independent woman to allow myself to rely on anything else to find me food. For now, anyway. Maybe I will find it in my heart and let myself continue to soften. It scares me to give up this control. It’s too soon. We’ve only known each other two weeks.
I told him already I was worried about his drinking; I couldn’t help myself. I spent a year and a half dating a guy whose friend groups and housemates consisted of actual and functioning alcoholics. I won’t stand for it. After the mezcal tasting he took me to, we kissed on a rooftop bar looking over the quiet spires of the main cathedral in the Zocalo before he ordered another mezcal and the bar owners gave us a complimentary round because he knew them, and as I found out later, he was there to also rekindle that relationship and hopefully sell them more mezcal.
That was all fine until we went back to his apartment, and I bared my naked thighs and my leg to him on his couch. I wanted him to hold me and cherish me as things were heating up, but he was holding a beer. Drinking a goddamn beer. After all of that? Not cool. I felt like the hierarchy was playing out in front of my eyes. Me, sitting there, expecting, wanting. Him, drinking a beer. The closest thing to him, physically. I brought this up with him because I’m a woman who can’t keep her mouth shut or let the potential elephant just exist in the room.
“I had a really nice time with you tonight. I know you are very passionate about mezcal, and I don’t want you to change yourself for me. But I hardly drink, and tonight you were drinking a lot, and I’m not sure this is going to work out,” I told him in Spanish as we cuddled after sex.
“I enjoyed my time too,” he said, “How about this: let’s do a sober activity for our next date?”
And that’s how the absurdity of doing a spin class together was born.
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