Made You Look

Thoughts Outside the Office

Made you look. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anybody. Mostly because half the fun is letting several different people wonder whether I mean them. I saw it, though. I saw the second look. I saw the little pause. I saw the part where you tried to act like you were absolutely not looking directly at me. You were. It’s fine. I probably knew exactly what I was doing when I got dressed.

And I have been enjoying that lately. A lot, actually. The hair is longer, I have been putting a little more effort into how I look, and apparently I have remembered that I enjoy walking into a room knowing damn well I look good. I like flirting. I like being looked at. I like catching somebody looking and watching them realize they got caught. After the absolute shitshow that has been this year, finding out I can still make somebody lose their train of thought for a second feels like a perfectly reasonable little prize.

It has also been fun because flirting is easy when it stays in that little gray area where nobody has to decide what anything means. A look can just be a look. A text can be slightly too suggestive and still technically innocent. A joke can have two meanings and everybody can pretend they only heard one of them. Nobody has to make a five-year plan. Nobody has to discuss feelings. Nobody has to promise anything. You can just enjoy being wanted, enjoy wanting something back, and keep moving.

That part I can handle just fine.

The problem is that eventually flirting stops being hypothetical.

Eventually something moves from funny and harmless into something that might actually happen, and apparently that is where my brain has decided to stage a full-scale emergency evacuation. Because there is a very big difference between knowing somebody wants you and realizing there may now be an actual opportunity for something to happen with that information. The first part is fun. The second part suddenly requires you to participate in your own life.

That is where the panic started. Not cute nerves. Not butterflies. Not the kind of nervous where you laugh and say you are “out of practice.” I mean the kind of panic where some part of your brain suddenly starts screaming, no, no, no, wait, I changed my mind. Put everything back. Put my family back. Put my life back. Put everybody where they were. I don’t want to start over.

And that is the part that has knocked the wind out of me because I thought I already had. I have been doing all the things people do when their lives change whether they asked for the change or not. I go to work. I go to court. I raise my children. I keep the office moving. I pay bills. I answer questions. I make decisions. I keep going. I have survived every single day that showed up whether I particularly wanted it to or not.

But apparently surviving the end of one life is not the same thing as agreeing to begin another one.

There is this strange little stretch of time after everything changes where you can still sort of hover beside the old life. You know it is gone. You know things are different. You know there is no realistic way to put everything back exactly where it used to be. But as long as you do not move too far forward, some irrational little part of you can still pretend you have not really left.

Then something comes along that belongs only to the new life, and suddenly there is no pretending.

That is the cliff.

It is not that I think I will fall and never get back up. I know I will survive. I have gotten almost offensively good at surviving things I never wanted to survive. The problem is that surviving means I land somewhere else. It means I actually become the woman who moved on. The woman who starts having experiences that belong entirely to the life after. The woman who does something with the empty time instead of sitting there staring at it. The woman who eventually lets somebody new into spaces that used to belong to somebody else.

And apparently I am much more comfortable standing at the edge of that cliff making jokes than I am actually jumping. Because now that I can see the jump, there is this almost desperate instinct to reach for somebody. Not necessarily because I want to go backward. Not necessarily because I want anybody in particular. Just because there is something terrifying about realizing I am about to have to move.

It is almost subconscious. That little internal plea for somebody to grab your hand and give you a reason not to go yet. Please complicate this. Please make this impossible. Please distract me. Please give me some excuse to stand right here a little longer so I do not have to be the one who chooses to step into whatever comes next.

And that is what I am trying to understand, because another part of me absolutely wants what comes next. I want the flirting. I want the attention. I want to be wanted. I want to get dressed and know I look good and have somebody else know it too. I want to laugh. I want to have fun. I want a night where nothing is heavy and nobody needs anything from me and I am not carrying every bad thing that has happened this year around like an oversized purse I forgot I was allowed to put down.

And yes, maybe I want sex. There. Everybody survived.

I am thirty-eight years old. I am perfectly capable of knowing when a man’s intentions may not involve a deeply moving exploration of my inner world. Maybe that is fine. Maybe not everything has to become something. Maybe I am allowed to want somebody without immediately wondering whether he would make a suitable emergency contact.

Hell, I cannot be alone forever. I do not want to be alone forever.

But apparently there is still a very big part of me that hears all of that and immediately screams back, I DON’T WANT THIS LIFE. I want my family. I want the version of my life where I knew who would be in my house tomorrow morning. I want the future I thought I had already chosen. I want to stop being so fucking adaptable.

And that is where all the fun suddenly turns into panic, because moving forward sounds wonderful right up until moving forward starts to become real. Then suddenly it is not some vague thing I will do eventually. It is not a concept. It is not a speech about healing. It is something happening now, and every step forward makes the ending behind me feel more final.

That is the part I hate.

I can want somebody new and still miss what I had. I can be excited and still terrified. I can want to go and still desperately want somebody to stop me. I can know damn well that the person in front of me is not coming to rescue me and still have some tiny panicked part of me hoping somebody, anybody, will grab my hand long enough that I do not have to jump today.

None of that makes sense in a clean little inspirational quote, which is probably why I trust it more.

Maybe starting over is not supposed to feel brave. Maybe sometimes it feels ridiculous and sexy and terrifying and sad all at the exact same time. Maybe sometimes you stand in front of the mirror knowing damn well you look good, enjoy the fact that somebody else noticed, and then five minutes later want to crawl back into a life that no longer exists.

That is apparently where I am.

So yes, made you look.

I meant to.

I just did not realize that when you looked back, it might suddenly make the rest of my life look real too.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm

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