I had received and enjoyed an opportunity to flirt on facebook.
In itself this would have been a most unlikely surprise.
To heighten the unusual and unusually pleasing quality of the event, the woman who chose to find me beautiful and to flirt with me was a woman who can claim distinction as her right, at least as I count distinction. She is a poet, a writer, a journalist, and an academic. She excels in these roles.
To begin with I reminded myself it might be a joke or a game, that I ought to take care not to believe flattery too quickly; and for me, her interest alone was extravagant flattery. Still, neither does resisting the pleasure seem very much to the point. So a see-sawing, trapeze-swinging oscillation seems the best strategy: Enjoy it, with reminders frequent or not, to take care.
So it went over the weekend. Light-hearted, warm, and frequent, with lots of X’s and O’s. It was, well, a little exciting, at least on the surface. Beneath, I suspect my excitement ran pretty deeply. She is the sort of woman I might hope to have for a close friend; (as the diligent reader may discover, elsewhere in these blogs I describe sex growing smaller in my rear-view mirror). So at present a close friend is my dearest wish when thinking of women. Which translates into the flirtation carrying more power than one might reasonably suppose.
But then...
I had taken it seriously, and began to be afraid it would turn out badly; as, depending on the definition, it may yet. So, the diagnosis was cold feet. I begged off, pleading illness, which was true, and took a nap. When I returned to the page, she seemed to have taken up flirting with someone else.
I was, so to speak, crushed.
And so things remained until this morning: There she was, friendlier than ever, and so our back-and-forth continues; to what end, Heaven only knows, though I expect when she has absorbed the extent of my destitution, she will wisely and gracefully withdraw.
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