Mountain Man
It was always a given how I’d meet my person. I was going to be on assignment scaling a snow-capped mountain in some remote country that you probably haven’t heard of. He was going to be tall, gorgeous, dark haired, a photographer, and also on assignment.
The details as to why we are both scaling a mountain mid-snowstorm are blurry and insignificant. What is significant is the part where we lock eyes.
I’d decided that after falling into eachothers arms, we would share a lifetime of traveling the world together doing very cultured things and having very cultured conversations. We would be the kind of people you’d want at your dinner party.
I listened to a friend talk the other day about how she’s working with her therapist on not holding her partner up to a standard of perfection. Because perfect is a lot of responsibility.
And how instead of constantly noticing the gap between him and how he’s measuring up to this ideal, just letting him be whoever he is and letting that person be enough.
Her words felt like therapy by proxy. Because truth is, I’m definitely guilty of holding out for mountain man. Or at least noticing all the ways that whatever date I’m currently sat across from isn’t mountain man.
And when I play that game, mountain man always wins.
His jokes are funnier. His relationship with his mom is better. He drinks his coffee blacker, and he’s read more Jorge Luis Borges.
I can’t help but hold out hope, in part because if I let mountain man go, that means that I would have to let go of mountain girl too. She’s the measuring stick I use for myself. The one that I hold up to notice all the places I’m not enough.
Mountain girl does the NYT crossword in pen, wears a lot of black, and orgasms every time, much to the satisfaction of her sexual partners. She never overpacks and definitely knows where the Kennedy Space Center is located (something I may have been asked over the weekend and had no idea how to respond to, turns out it’s in Florida).
I thought about all my favorite people, and wondered if I’d like them more if they’d won prizes, or managed to be a few inches taller, or slimmer, or sparklier.
The answer wasn’t just no. It was a hard no.
I already preferred them exactly as they were. And I actively did not want their stories to have better punchlines, or their teeth to be whiter. Idealistic, more perfect versions of my favorite people felt weird and kind of creepy.
So why were mountain man and myself exceptions? Why did our posture need to be straighter?
I thought about how measuring anyone up against mountain man is kind of like me deciding that I already knew who they should be, instead of just letting them show me who they are.
And with mountain girl, it was like I was telling myself who to be, instead of just meeting who I already was.
Sure, sometimes if everything could just go the way I’d already planned then it would really be an improvement and can the universe just understand that I’ve got this and follow my lead on this one, thanks?
But just as much and just as often as life would have been way cooler if it’d, like, taken my cues. It can also blindside you, but in a good way.
Because the thing about who people are, is that it’s usually 1000x better than anything I could have come up with on my own.
Sometimes when I invite someone over for dinner, all my mind can see is that I only marinaded the meat in one sauce, and how they’d probably like me more if I’d made two sauces. In fact, yes, I was certain they’d prefer two-sauce me.
Two-sauce me was just another version of mountain girl, which means that she doesn’t actually exist.
Holding out for hypothetical love kind of felt like a waste of the sauce that I had made, the one that was sitting in front of us getting cold.
There was something really beautiful about having someone keep showing up for my one-sauce self.
One-sauce me has been late to every. single. date. she’s had with the same guy in the last month. Except that four weeks ago she technically wasn’t late, it’s just that she text him when he was in the taxi going to the restaurant where they’d planned to have dinner, and told him to come over to her friend’s house instead where she was obnoxiously drunk off tamarind vodka, and why is he still dating her again?
The next date there is not much of an improvement, except that this time one-sauce me is thirty minutes late and has managed to lock her keys in her apartment. He proves to have the patience of a saint, and drives her across town to get an extra set of keys from her landlord.
Except that once she’s back in her apartment she realizes that her keys were in her pocket the entire time.
A detail she does not tell her landlord, and waits until much, much later in the evening to tell her date. To which he responds, “You wait until we’ve drunk a whole bottle of wine to tell me?”
She gives him what she hopes is an endearing smile, and he laughs and says that he would have done the same thing.
It makes her like him even more than if she’d just been a functioning human being and not fake-lost her keys in the first place.
She’s really trying to get better, so for the upcoming date she writes in her calendar DON’T BE LATE!! With the capps and the exclamation marks and everything because she really means business this time, and then she ends up being 15 minutes late to the date anyway.
But she figures that if she deep throats him, it might make up for it. And how she’d had a conversation with her guy friends recently about deep throating which made her wonder if she’d ever actually deep throated in her life, even though she’d always thought she’d been doing it all along, and how this is why her parents can’t read her newsletter.
And the whole reason that one-sauce me is late to the date is because she’d scheduled a massage right beforehand so that she’d be relaxed, but then she gets afraid of maybe falling asleep during the massage and the massage people just leaving her to nap. So she tells the masseuse that she has something afterwards and can the massage lady please end things right at three.
And then she spends the whole massage wondering if that was a really rude thing to say. But then the massage lady rubs some spot on her foot that one-sauce me swears is the nicest thing anyone's ever done to her body, and she forgets about maybe offending the massage lady and instead decides to spend the rest of her life studying foot reflexology.
And the very massage that she’d booked so that she’d show up to the date as her best self ends up being the reason she’s frazzled and running late and how isn’t that just textbook irony, and none of this 10000 spoons when all you need is a knife bullshit.
I wasn’t sure what mountain man thought about reflexology, or if he would be open to this new life path. I got the feeling that it might be a no.
I wondered if mountain man would be ok with my one sauce. He seemed like a multiple sauce kind of guy.
I wasn’t sure if I was a multiple sauce kind of girl. I was quite happy with my single sauce. Honestly, with the right company, I didn’t even need a sauce.
I questioned if mountain man would even realize if I didn’t come for him. Something told me probably not. He’d be too busy debating very smart things with mountain girl and their 20 sauces.
The more I thought about it, the more I reasoned that it couldn't hurt to let them both get a little cold up there on the mountainside.
After all, I figured I was gonna be pretty busy cooking for people who didn’t even notice that there was just one sauce. People who sometimes, even asked for seconds.