Just thought I’d give a little background info for the psycho-analyzers out there (feel free to skip it if you’re not one of them). As a girl, I was a hopeless, starry-eyed mushy romantic. In fact, it’s even a little embarrassing to recall my fondness of puffy dresses and princesses, and how every imaginary game involved some elaborate romantic vignette.
This extreme fantasy-romanticism carried over into high school, where as a shy, awkward, passionate, hormone-charged teenage it got me in landed in two obsessive, painful, year-long crushes, one after the other – you know the kind. Of course I couldn’t squeak out nary a word to either of these exquisite specimens of humankind, and the couple of times I forced myself to talk to them still make my insides whither with shame to recall. As a result of these failures, my strategy became: light some candles, put on Sarah McLachlan, let the tears roll down my face, and send strong vibes of love floating out into the universe to land directly into their consciousness, when they would suddenly realize that they were inexplicitly madly in love with the quiet girl with braces in English class. (Needless to say, this strategy did not prove fruitful.) What can I say? I never had brothers. What I knew about boys and girls I learned from Disney movies. I will say that it was a bit gratifying this summer, when about ten years later I ran into the latter of the two crushes, and it turns out he wasn’t quite the godly being I had remembered… in fact he was experiencing some premature balding. I, on the other hand, had improved with age. So take that.
Very gradually, over many years, my awkwardness diminished along with my romantic fantasies. I decided to focus on myself, instead of the opposite sex. I lived in some new places, spent a chunk of time abroad, and checked off a good number of the “things to do before I die”. As I became more absorbed in my own life, more confident and more the person I wanted to be, romance (or the lack of it) became nothing but a slight nagging annoyance, until finally I resolved that screw it, I was going to become a hermit woman in a tiny cabin in the woods in a tiny mountain town for the rest of my life. I would chop my own firewood and learn to hunt game and scavenge mushrooms and secretly write torrid epic novels beside my crackling fireplace. (Yes perhaps a tad dramatic for a girl in her late 20s). With this new fantasy in mind, I went to work for a summer in a National Park… with a bunch of single men, it turns out. And something shifted.
That summer I didn’t find love exactly, but I did find some hints of it, along with this new power in myself to be fun and comfortable, and even desirable, in the company of men. I was the girl that would hop in the back of the truck to go fishing with the boys and stay up into the late hours joking around and drinking PBRs with them. I would tear up the dance floor to the bluegrass bands in the arms of many fellas. I was their sidekick and their darling. I was surprised to find myself being that girl, and I loved being her.
Something changed. I didn’t rekindle the romantic fantasies, but I did realize that my hermit-in-the-woods fantasy was probably equally unrealistic. I didn’t become convinced that I would surely find someone to share my life with, but neither did it seem certain that I wouldn’t. At the very least, I realized that I was dateable, and that there is something fun and affirming in the attention – or at the very least entertaining – even if it doesn’t always work out in the end.
And with all this fresh in my brain, I moved to a ski town. And that’s where this story begins.
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