The Bubble

It's unusual for me not to want to write.

Wait. That's not right. I have writer's block like everyone else. There are days when the thought of sitting in front of the keyboard and trying to hammer something out leads to me lace up my running shoes and go knock out six miles.

It's unusual for me not to want to write about relationships.

I'm a fairly introspective person, particularly when it comes to interacting with other people. On my good days it means that I am a thoughtful friend or girlfriend. It means texts during the middle of the day just to say that I'm glad you're in my life, a really good Christmas present. It means that I'll show you in a thousand small ways that you mean the world to me.

On my bad days it means that I obsess over every interaction I've had in the past two weeks. I'll have conversations in my head and finish them the way I wanted to finish them. I'll worry about how I phrased some innocuous text. I'll chew my lip over the length of time it takes someone to return an email.

Because of the way my brain is hard-wired, I write about relationships. It's how I process the world, and I usually feel better when I'm done journaling or when I've finished a blog post. It's something that's neither good nor bad, and at this point I've either wavered all of my friends or we have a tacit oral agreement that they could end up on the blog.

Right. Except not all of them.

A few weeks ago I started seeing someone new.

I cannot emphasize enough how unexpected it is. I never like anyone when I first meet them, so when we seemed to click right from the first date I was as surprised as anyone. And when I wanted to continue seeing him, and walked home from every date smiling like an idiot, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

Sounds like the kind of thing I'd write about, huh?

Except I don't want to write about it.

Partly, I expect, because everything is still really new and I don't know what it is and I don't want to get too publicly excited about it (as if the idiotic grin I have on my face isn't enough of a tip-off). Because, you know, people are unpredictable.

Okay, yeah, that's part of it. But the bigger part is The Bubble.

You know that part of dating someone when you're, quite simply, dopamined out of your mind? Where it takes you twenty minutes to say goodnight and your stomach flips when you get a text message from them? Where every damn song on the radio is about you and your text messages to your best friend become completely fucking irritating?

That's The Bubble.

I'm in it. My predictive text now recognizes "swooooooon" as a legitimate word. I owe my best friend a night out and about 23 drinks. I have a list in my head of things that I can't wait to share with him. The memory of the look on his face the first time I laughed so hard I snorted makes my heart skip. Every time we discover one more thing we have in common I have to fight off the urge to kiss him. And ohmygod have I mentioned how his smile made me realize "weak at the knees" isn't just an expression?

If we were in high school (and it was 1999), I'd be making him a mixtape.

That's the reason I'm so hesitant to write about this, to write about him. Because The Bubble is such a good (and, have I mentioned, unexpected) place to find myself. Once I start writing about it there's the obvious hello, internet, welcome into my life aspect, of course. But moreover, it invites me to a level of scrutinizing this new thing that is, let's get real, unhealthy for this short of an amount of time. Part of me knows that. But the part of me that's used to writing-as-processing, that's used to over-analyzing (and over-sharing) every damn thing doesn't really know what to do. It's like there's a tiny part of my brain that's shouting "But that was a silly thing to say" and "What are you thinking?" and "YOU'RE BLOWING THIS."

But the volume on that part of my brain also seems to be turned waaaaaaay down these days (thanks again, brain chemistry!) The Bubble is going to burst at some point, I know that. Just like I know that at some point scrutiny will happen just like I'm certain that at some point I'll want to start writing about this.

For now, though, I'm happy with our long goodbyes and my shaky knees. And that's all I'm going to say about it.