That Friend...

The winter that just passed was a little bit rough for me, and I was just going over some of the events with a friend.

There was a night where I was in an individual's apartment, and I knew that night that the relationship with that individual had come to a close. Only I was an hour from home and without my car, and so I was stranded in this location with nothing but a cell phone.

And sometimes I wonder about fate: if fate exists and if so, what for. Because for some reason that night, my cell phone rang when I most needed it to ring, and it was Mal. She talked to me for hours, for so long that the battery on her portable phone died. And when the battery died, she hung up, charged it for ten minutes, and called back. We went on like this for about three hours, with the battery dying and her calling back as soon as it had enough charge to hold a few minutes' worth of conversation.

I was stranded and crying and unable to sleep, in very close proximity to someone I had just broken up with. And his name was added to a very long list of names of people who I have unsuccessfully dated; people who are not suited to dating anyone but somehow end up dating me.

And I feel -- quite often -- that I have really lost the game in the dating scene, that I have gone through so many traumatic breakups and upsetting relationships that there is simply no point in going further, no point in hoping for something better.

These bouts of troublesome dating are an ongoing theme in my life, one I want to work on improving greatly before I end up married to some schmoe who can't walk and chew gum at the same time. (Although, if that were the smallest worry of someone I dated, I would probably be a happy girl.)

But then I realized that there is another theme here, that there is a theme of people stepping in and helping me pick up the pieces, and I think, Hey. Maybe I'm not so poorly off altogether.

Maybe I'm not so poorly off at all.