Somewhere With Regret

Every once in a while some random memory comes rushing to the front of my brain completely uninvited. I could be doing something as innocent as checking the mail and then BOOM.

There it is.

Unprompted.

Unwarranted.

Usually unnecessary.

That’s what happened last night. I was driving home from work and a weird memory from sophomore year of high school decided to pop in and say hello. Funny enough, it falls in line with my absolute shit track record for dating, but that’s not the part that came rushing back.

It was a memory about someone hitting me.

Not hitting on me.

I’m not that lucky.

Someone being violent and absolutely overflowing with man rage.

That sounds weird and I’m sticking with it.

Anyway.

Sophomore year I was freshly out of the closet. Or maybe I wasn’t. Hold on, I’m questioning my own timeline now. It might have been summer. It might have been early junior year.

Fantastic.

I’m fact-checking my own trauma.

At some point I had “met” a guy, we kissed, and apparently that was all the scientific evidence I needed. “Yep. This works for me. I’M GAY.”

Simple times.

Even as I write this, more stuff is coming back to me and I’m questioning whether I’m emotionally prepared to unpack all of it, but… the post has already been started and I’m no quitter.

At any rate, a friend wanted to set me up with someone. Or maybe her boyfriend wanted to set me up with someone he knew? Honestly, I don’t remember. All I know is that I was supposedly being set up with a bisexual guy and I’m fairly certain that somewhere during this entire saga I ended up making out with both my friend and her boyfriend.

But never the bisexual guy.

We didn’t even speak.

More on that in a minute.

Meeting this man involved spending the weekend away because my friend and her boyfriend were performing in a backyard wrestling match.

Honestly, the deeper I get into this story, the more it sounds like something I hallucinated after eating expired Lunchables, but I promise every word of this is true.

The world before the internet completely took over our lives was just… different.

Backyard wrestling was apparently a thing.

People got dressed up like WWE wrestlers, built makeshift rings in somebody’s backyard, and put on full wrestling matches for whoever happened to show up.

Nobody was filming content.

Nobody was livestreaming.

Nobody was trying to go viral.

There may have been someone taking pictures.

It was just a bunch of people pretending to beat each other up on a Saturday afternoon because that sounded like a fun way to spend the weekend.

I wasn’t there to judge.

I was there to meet a man.

We stayed the night before at somebody’s house. Whose house? Couldn’t tell you.

The early 2000s were absolute chaos.

We watched Blair Witch Project 2, which was terrible, and then for reasons that remain completely unknown, we all made out with each other. Which was significantly less terrible.

Also, we were all sober.

That feels like an important detail.

So we’re at the backyard wrestling match and the bisexual guy finally shows up with his friends. Someone points him out to me and I immediately realize I am profoundly, catastrophically not attracted to him. To the point where I made a conscious effort not to make eye contact. The feeling must have been mutual because he didn’t come talk to me either. Needless to say, my romantic weekend quickly became… not that.

At some point I volunteered to go pick up lunch for everybody because apparently I’ve always coped with awkward social situations by giving myself errands.

The memory that came rushing back was us returning from that lunch run.

Something had happened while we were gone that made one of the wrestling guys get all up in his man feelings and the second we got back he charged straight at me and smacked everything I was carrying right out of my hands.

It was terrifying.

An angry man had just rushed me for reasons I still don’t completely understand.

But if I’m being perfectly honest…

I was mostly devastated because my lunch was ruined. I had really been looking forward to that sandwich.

I think this was also the exact moment I realized that the bisexual guy and I probably weren’t going to work out because how dare he not come to my rescue after all six minutes we’d spent aggressively avoiding eye contact.

Looking back, expecting a guy I’d never actually spoken to to defend my honor against an angry backyard wrestler may have been setting the bar just a little too high.

Somewhere in there is probably a metaphor for my dating life.