A couple of columns ago I wrote about the “beautiful dancing girl” who I met at a Phish show years ago. Well, after a great month of hanging out together, I left on my extended travels (to be about four months), and we arranged for her to come visit a little less than two months into my trip in early August. We maintained frequent, daily contact, texting often, and talking on the phone a couple times a week. We talked about how we missed one another and how we looked forward to her visit. We even discussed her coming out a second time before I returned home, too. I was excited about her and the potential for the future. All was well. Until it wasn’t.

As mentioned, she’s a huge Phish fan, and she’d made plans to see the band three separate weekends between early July and early September. In fact, she had a lot of travel plans for the summer. First, she went to her grandma’s place in Cincinnati with her mom, dad, and dog; the following weekend she went to the mountains to see her cousin for the 4th of July, and then she had the first Phish weekend in Charleston, SC, the weekend after. On both of those first two trips she was very active in her communication with me, and I had no reason to think anything had changed – and as far as I can tell, at the time, neither did she; everything was going well. Then came Phish.

It was over before it could ever get off the ground, sadly… (Image retrieved from here and comes courtesy of Vera Arsic.)

A little background: she used to be a party girl, and she has been pretty open about her tendency to develop crushes on “red flag” type of guys, many of whom you can find by the dozen at Phish shows. She’s had a number of trysts with them over the years since we first met, and they all sputtered out or flamed out, but they were looney messes all the while, best I can tell. That is until she met the guy she dated for about three years before me which seemed like a “normal” stable relationship with its fair share of issues and frustrations – but all relationships have some of those. Anyway, when we started hanging out, she told me that the reason she’d never dated me before was because I “had my shit together.” I was “too responsible,” but she had changed, as had her taste in men. Or so she said.

Back to Phish Weekend One. She went down a day early for the 3-day run of concerts, and it might’ve been about that day that I had a weird sensation that I couldn’t place. First, I sensed something was askew with her, and paradoxically, I started to miss her more than I had up until that point. I’m not one of those kooky “vibes of the universe” kind of guy, but her communication dropped off precipitously – which was reasonable because she was going on vacation to see her favorite band and hang out with friends she only saw at these shows – but something inside me burned that she’d hooked up with another guy, or at least was thinking about it. Long story short, I wrote an email to her on the Sunday of her festivities (day three of the concerts) basically telling her how I felt about her (no, I didn’t say I loved her) and all that jazz. We spoke briefly on her ride home on Monday (today, the day I’m writing this) and I could tell it was off. She said she hadn’t read my email yet. We told one another we missed the other, but I didn’t really believe her when she said it.

Fast-forward a couple hours and I’m at a car detailing place getting some work done on my car and she calls me, still on the road home, indicating she’d read my email when she stopped for lunch and that it was “super sweet” but made her “feel anxious.” Perhaps I’d overplayed my hand (and yes, I thought about including the text of it here, but it’s a little too embarrassing this early in my postmortem assessment of where things went off the rails). We talked for a little while, and she started downplaying things she’d said and ways she’d behaved, and if I wasn’t so anti-pop culture language, I’d be tempted to say she engaged in a bit of gaslighting (ugh, it pains me to type that). I tried to cycle through all of what she’d conveyed to me just in recent weeks since I hit the road and it didn’t add up. In the interim, she was supposed to have a weekend off from travel this upcoming weekend, but she’d booked a flight and made plans to go see Phish in Chicago. Yeah, I’m pretty sure she’s got another guy… I asked her if she still wanted to keep her plans to visit me, and she didn’t offer up an entirely comforting answer – basically a mixture of yes/no/I don’t know. After Chicago she goes to NY to see the band. I told her I was going to give her space until after that and if she wanted to contact me, I would love that, but I’m not going to bother her until then. My guess is her visit to me will be canceled and with it whatever I thought/hoped might happen in the future.

The moral of the story at this early juncture – before I’ve even had time to process it at all – is that when someone shows you who they are, believe them. My criticisms of her when we were occasional friends were that she was flighty, aloof, and sometimes came off as rude and dismissive, and certainly evidenced a lot of signs of being a hot mess. Still, I gave her some benefit of the doubt – yes, in part because she’s hot – but also because I didn’t want to rush to any conclusions. There was also something appealing about her beyond her physical beauty. But it seems that maybe I should’ve trusted my gut.

I hate dating. I hate that I’m going to do it again. I hate that I’ll encounter a lot more frustration before I have some fun and connection, probably. But so it goes… I saw this musician this past weekend I’d never seen but wanted to for a while, Ray Wylie Hubbard. He has a line in one of his songs, “Mother Blues,” that goes: “And the days that I keep my gratitude / Higher than my expectations / Ah! Well, I have really good days.”

I guess at this stage I should be thankful for the really awesome month we had together, and even those first three weeks apart when it felt like we were still making progress for the future. It’ll save me a lot of frustration and heartache if I choose to look at it that way. Having too high of expectations really does just end up letting you down all too often…

Marco Esquandoles
Starting Over – Again