Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain...

"The One"....

I always felt that the concept of "the man behind the curtain" resonates through my life with such consistency that it's hard not to feel like Dorothy sometimes. Fabulous shoes?...check. Home left behind?....check. The vision of some "wizard" holding everything I lack in a velvet bag, which is ultimately squashed as I realize I had it all along?...check.

So perhaps all women do this. We imagine this man...somewhere in time, possessing so many wonderful qualities that when we meet him, it will be as if there is a big Vegas-style sign hanging over his head with the words, "This Be Him" all lit up in neon wonderfulness. Our eyes will meet, and suddenly...we'll KNOW. This is the one we imagined inside of every nut job we dated before....the one we'd never leave and who would never leave us. My friends and I referred to this Wonder Man as "The Ultimate". The ultimate friend, the ultimate lover, the ultimate father, the ultimate son. Nothing specifically perfect about him in the general sense...just perfect for me in a round about way. I imagined the two of us having the kind of life most people are too afraid to have. Seeing the world together, making art together, living for the pure rush of learning something new (insert image of Aladdin and Jasmin singing "A Whole New World").

I don't actually look for the Ultimate or anything close to a Wonder Man. I'd be blissfully happy with someone who simply prefers to live for the seconds his life is made up of. Who is perfectly willing to fight sleep to get through a good book or a deep conversation and doesn't find a thing about me weird or uninteresting. And so what if I am weird, because he likes weird...and we'll go hand in hand being weird together sipping coffee and observing life and all the silly people in it. I'd rather know exactly what I need and where I'm going, and for that to just so happen to be the same direction as the person who makes my legs shake and my heart beat faster. Anything short of that is just smoke and mirrors....