But of course she sees you. You are here in this place, looking at her, and she sees you here, looking. From that, she adjudges you as someone incapable of ever seeing her.
How will you convince her otherwise? How will you convince her that her judgment is incorrect? You are undeniably here, and you are undeniably looking.
Strippers are incapable of feeling love.
Honestly, I have no idea.
The best available research indicates that it's impossible: she is hit on so consistently and constantly that, here at the bar, she notices flirtation aimed her way the way most of us notice gnats in summertime: just a thing that happens, of no real significance.
Not hitting on her offers you no advantage, either. Like most people with good self-esteem, she seeks the click of instant mutual attraction. Your resolute attempt to draw her attention by not drawing her attention is thus, by definition, doomed to fail.
But take heart: though she does not love you and, as best as science can tell, never will, it is very much like she loves you. For just watch her. (No, not like that. In action, I mean. Don't stare. Yes, she has very fetching cleavage, and she's not wearing that blouse by accident, but that's not what I mean.) Watch the careful-yet-assured way she holds the jigger while she measures the gin and then the vermouth as she prepares your martini. Watch how delicately the mixing spoon swirls within her fingers. Watch how she spears the olives on the toothpick just so, dead through the middle of each.
No, this isn't love. But it is done with the care of love. Enjoy your martini and accept that this is enough.
Over the past several years, all of the following have disappeared:
As I see it, the two most likely explanations for their disappearances are either an unsettled, attention-seeking house spirit, or else the occult machinations of some sort of trickster deity. What else really makes sense? I mean, how otherwise does one lose t-shirts?
The only other possibility I can see--and this is a long-shot--is that I have a quiet and really quite subtle stalker. She (for it would have to be a she--no male could maintain this level of concentration over all these years) would have to sneak into my house when I'm leave. She would, of course, know exactly when I leave, and have a very good sense of how long I'd be gone. She would move quietly around the house. She would look at things but rarely touch. She would want to leave no trace of her passing. (She would have given up on perfume years ago, lest I catch the merest trace of it wafting through the air.)
She would long to be invisible. Oh, what a joy that would be! Then she could stay in the house when I came home. She'd have to be very, very quiet, but she could just stand there, ever so quietly, and watch me from a very close distance.
Every so often, it would get to be too much. She just wouldn't be able to stand letting me go. She would have to take something with her. But what would go unnoticed? The safest bet, as she would see it, would be a shirt that hadn't been worn in a long time. And, since she'd have been watching me, she would know exactly which shirt that would be.
And then, some indeterminate time later, I would say--and do say--"Wait a minute. Whatever happened to that shirt I used to have? I don't remember the last time I saw it." And I would and do look around everywhere I could and can imagine it might be, but I couldn't and can't find it. Eventually, with a puzzled look on my face, I would and do give up.
It's probably a disgruntled house spirit. That makes the most sense.
Something happened yesterday, a conflict with a person, and I struggled to release the energy of it. Was it I or she that caused that unrelease? Probably both, of course. I tried severing the energy ties, but it wasn't that simple. Those ties weren't there the way they used to be (a good thing), but neither were they entirely absent.
It wasn't obvious what to do. Ultimately, I found that if I held the space immediately around me, and envisioned suffusing that space with blue (which is for me the color of love), the sharp edge of what happened would dissipate. It was just me in a blue light.
I wondered, over the last week, in details inarticulable until yesterday, if she was setting up exactly this moment. She doesn't know how to let go, so she got me to do it for her. She's an odd one.
I wish her a life suffused in blue.
If you are around my age and my level of geekiness, you might remember the pre-Internet phenomenon of Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs. BBSs were computers you could call up from your computer (via, yes, you remember correctly: a modem) and connect with, and then you could...well, you could do stuff. Mostly you would write posts on message boards and send messages to other people. Some BBSs were places you could download software (usually hacked). Some BBSs had multiple phone lines so you could real-time chat with other users. If you were a teenage geek/nerd like me, this passed for something like a social life.
Most everyone in BBS land used a handle rather than their real name. Whatever my main handle was, it's lost to me now, which I'm sure is for the best. I'm certain I thought it was cool at the time, and I'm certain now it wasn't cool at all.
But at some point I decided to develop an alter ego named Ima Radster, who posed as a relatively novice user and WROTE ENTIRELY IN ALL CAPS. You know how people now hate it when other people online write in all caps? Well, they hated it even more back then. If you were on a BBS at all, it implied you had a certain minimum level of geekiness/nerdiness, a level that set you into a particular subculture--and boy oh boy ignore the social norms of a subculture at your peril.
But the thing was, being Ima Radster was fun. First of all, Ima Radster was totally convinced that he was, in fact, a radster. He was impervious to all forms of criticism and attack (and boy was he met with criticism and attack); he just plodded cheerfully on. But there was also something kind of delightful about the way he expressed himself, a certain freedom found in those ALL CAPS. He blithely plunged into any conversation he entered, jovial and ignorant, unapologetic to the last. I guess this would fall into what we now consider trolling. But my oh my was it fun.
I MEAN SERIOUSLY GUYS YOU SHOULD TRY IT SOMETIME. JUST HAPPILY TYPE AWAY IN ALL CAPS IN YOUR DAY-TO-DAY WORLD AND SEE IF IT DOESN'T MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER ABOUT THINGS. YOU HAVE TO FOCUS ON THE "HAPPILY" PART, THOUGH--THIS IS NOT THE SPACE TO GET MEAN OR AGGRESSIVE. THIS IS THE SPACE WHERE YOU'RE LIKE, "HEY, REMEMBER THE SPICE GIRLS? THEY WERE GREAT, HUH?"
It's like being the opposite of a ninja.
25 YEARS LATER, AND STILL A RADSTER.
DAMN RIGHT.