The Q.T.

The vast whiteness on the screen before me is mocking my happiness, taunting my joy, and otherwise desperately pleading with me to resume my thoroughly irresponsible but generally quite entertaining online dating ways so that I might restore my blog to its glory of yesteryear.

Smrtygrl's writings used to be replete with tales of short-lived and ill-conceived lust for boys who's appeal directly correlated to precisely how little the two of us had in common, heightened states of disenchanted disappointment brought on as a result of the receipt of horribly bad and wholly inappropriate holiday gifts and small kitchen appliances, and semi-intermittent bouts with alcoholism that somehow enabled me to cope with all of the above and then some...and all of which at one time or another marked an admittedly pretty shameful existence before I fell hard and fast for a blue-eyed boy of 5'8" who might actually like me just as much as I like him.

Hard drinking' and fast lovin' has given way to a state of contentment and (no longer cautious) optimism the likes of which I'm not quite sure I've really ever known before. And the quality of the content on my beloved blog is proving, with each passing day of M3 and my blissful courtship, to be the most innocent of victims of this crime against all that is supposedly exciting and fun and liberating and empowering about being a single woman of a certain age. If literary inspiration were a penis, I'd venture to guess that my tendency to periodically refer to myself in the third person probably wouldn't be the only thing I'd have in common with Bob Dole.

On Monday, having returned from my alpine sojourn with M3, I somehow managed to pull it together and write a heartfelt post marveling how the most mundane and routine moments with someone you care about can somehow end up being the ones you not only treasure the most deeply but for which you most desperately long when you're never together for enough time to even fathom what it'd feel like to take them for granted.

Later that day, I emailed the dear friend with whom we'd just spent the weekend. I thanked her profusely for her hospitality and expressed how happy I was that she and M3 had a chance to get to know one another a bit.

And then I explained how fucked I am.

In the midst of crafting Monday's post, I reached an unfortunate and not entirely unexpected milestone in my fairly short and not terribly illustrious history as a blogger.

M3 reads my blog pretty much every day. I know this. And he knows that I know this. And as much as I sincerely hoped it wouldn't become the case, that knowledge is causing me to self-edit my thoughts and to curb my freedom of expression in a way I never did before when my subject matter a) didn't read my blog and b) who would give a shit anyway?

And so, even though M3 has been lightheartedly and only half-seriously joking this week about how I really need to get the hell out of my mid-sized town, find a job in his mid-sized city and move my ass up there pronto, I simply can't write about it.

I can't expose my truest of emotions and write about how -- despite the blinding, undeniable reality that anyone in their right mind could (and given my occasional propensity to succumb to inexplicable bouts of irrationality when a cute boy is involved, probably should) compose a list of indefinite length consisting of the myriad, obvious reasons why its totally crazy to even joke about relocating to be with a boy I've been dating for just over one month but no more than two depending on who's doing the counting, let alone even dabble in considering the possibility of potentially pursuing the notion at some time in the future -- his jokes are totally freaking me out.

In the bestest of ways possible.

(But its more than that, really.)

In recent days, I've been completely overcome by a surprising and startling and entirely unfamiliar desire to be protective. Protective of something precious and rare and altogether on the verge of almost-completely-implausible. Something that, for the first time I think possibly ever, feels like not only does it belong to me, but I'm not terrified to acknowledge that I'm one of just two people being entrusted to treasure it. And nurture it. And keep it safe.

And private.

And that's all I have to say about that.