YOUR OWN ADVICE IS HARDEST TO TAKE

"To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment "already"? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a "crystallization," so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different."

Czesław Miłosz

A few years ago there was a girl, Ellie, that wanted to show me what for. She flirted, I flirted back. As girls often do, she confided in me. Said she was seeing a married man. I talked with her, without revealing to her that I was seeing a married woman. That I had been for 3 years. I listened, and let her talk.  It was easy to empathize, though her case was different from mine.
Among other things, he had told her he was moving out from his wife, getting an apartment the next day. But it didn't happen. My girl had never told me anything like that. He had strung her along with those kind of stories for quite some time. And she was distraught over it.

A week or so later, at a party at my friend Angela's on a New Years Eve, I spied a ceramic bird on a shelf. I asked Angela where she had gotten the bird.

“Oh, Ellie gave me that!”
Ellie said “Do you like it? I got it Target”.

I said yes, I liked it very much, but didn’t say that I wanted to get one for my girl (she loves ceramic birds) because, well, my girl is a well kept secret.
For almost five years, a very well kept secret.

A month went by, and one day Ellie called. She wanted to come to my apartment. She had something for me. She was pretty insistent, and I gave her directions. She came in and gave me a package with the ceramic bird in it. Then proceeded to try to seduce me.
I’m not one to turn down  pussy, at least I never had been before. But I explained to her that my heart belonged to another, and I wasn’t at liberty to say who, because my situation was so similar to hers.

She seemed to understand.

And here is the thing.

About two weeks or two days later she met someone, and they had an instant connection, and she forgot all about her married guy, forgot all about me, and within a  few months she was married to the new one, and they make the coolest couple. Just meant for each other.

Before I posted this I went through some old Facebook messages I had traded with her two years ago. I sent her this, a few hours after I had refused her advances. Man, it so relevant to what I've been doing for five years now.
But your own advice is the hardest to take. 

“There's something better for you out there, something cleaner, more crystalline, and pure. Some people like to say not to settle, but sometimes we settle. Sometimes a little love on whatever terms is what we need. But there is a time to move too. A time not to settle anymore.”

Addendum: I know why I cant take my own advice.
I still believe, baby. I'm still a believer.

Addendum #2; It took another two months from the posting, but I took my own advice.