My picker #dontsmokebowlsanddrivelikeme

My mom says my picker is broken. I pick 'wounded puppies' for romantic partners, she says. Pot meet kettle. I wonder where I learned it? Oy! But I must admit she has a point. When I look back on the lot of them that I have called my loves, they are indeed a breakfast club of hooligans. Still, I have fond memories. I wonder if they do too.

I wonder if Ryan, the skateboarder, remembers how we both cried as he proposed to me in Glacier Park. Rapids rushing below us, he pulled the ring out of his pocket and asked me to marry him. We were both so young, him even younger than I. We didn't know anything about life or the world around us, but for that moment we loved each other deeply and those tear filled blue eyes will always be on the edges of my dreams.

I wonder if Kara, the intellect, remembers how she used to tell me that "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel was her song to me. I used to blow her off and change the station. Then one day, years later, after she was no longer in my life, I listened to the words of that song. She was trying to tell me something so deep, and I was so boorish and callous. So unable to be in the moment. I wish she knew that I remember and I get it now. And I'm sorry for teasing her and changing it back to Staind or Eminem or something even more inane.

My fourth grade love, the first boy I ever kissed, passed away many years ago. I used to wonder if he remembered our kiss in that little restaurant in St. Louis. It wasn't his first kiss, so maybe it didn't make an impression on him, but it was my first kiss. And from the boy I had loved since the fourth grade!!! Holy shit!! It was like every tween romance book ever written. Slow, sweet, wet kisses stolen one Saturday afternoon when I was seventeen.

When I feel really nostalgic I wonder if Robert, the criminal, ever wonders what we could have had if things had been different. If he hadn't been raised in a gang, and I wasn't so naive and vulnerable. I was easy prey and the predator in him kept us from truly letting each other in. But he clung to me in the quiet moments. I wonder if he remembers that and misses my hugs.

And lastly, I wonder if Curtis, my last husband, remembers the drives we would take. How we would take off in any direction and just get lost. Listening to music, smoking bowls and talking about nothing and everything. Or maybe not talking at all and just listening to the sound of the woods whoosh past us. He would say that he loved just hanging out with me like this. Just the two of us. I wonder if he knows I miss those drives sometimes.

So, yeah, my picker is broken. Not to say that my past loves are broken people. Well, OK, maybe some of them are. But the missing pieces in them called out to the missing pieces in me like a Taylor Swift song that I couldn't get out of my head.

I haven't used my picker in quite awhile. I've been giving it time to heal and reflect on its track record. Stew in it's own mess for a bit. Give it some time to think about what it has done. The wreckage and carnage it has caused. OK, maybe all that applies to me too. My picker is not some actual staff that I dub my partners with, although that would be rad. It's all me and my choices. I will get my shit together. Or I won't. Singlehood isn't so bad after all. And in the end, that's all I was scared of anyway.