the forked road

remember when I was your everything

when without me you were nothing

I was who you ran to for something

and for me you would do anything

now its time to put to test this thing

When I was a teenager, right around the time I discovered my 'manhood' was for more than passing wastes, I found that I had this insatiable appetite for women. I did not have the typical kind of appetite the average teenage boy has. Mine was of a more harmless nature; this need to befriend them. I would spend days chasing them, courting them, embellishing them with sweet-nothings, but most importantly I listened to them. See, from an early age I already feared and hated being 'normal'. I was an individual and I would go to whatever lengths to prove it. I had to be unlike other teens and not chase after skirts for relations and relationships, but for meaningful profound friendships. Out of this situation I honed and perfected a new ability, a super power if you will. I knew how to get them to let me in. I daresay I had not met a single female who did not allow me to peek into their deepest darkest crevices of their souls, regaling me with the most intimate details of their lives. I knew things about some that even their boyfriends would never know. I tolled developing this skill foolishly believing it would be my way in. The end result was a string of girls who thought me closer than a brother. So automatically nothing beyond long intimate conversations would ever transpire between us. This is when I was introduced to the infamous Friends-zone, every red-blooded man's nightmare. Nothing makes a man's testicles shrivel faster than those words uttered by a woman of his desires, 'You are my friend, nothing can happen...'. The lonely room that one is sentenced into with the 'purest' intentions and the sweetest smiles. Where one walks in with his head hang, knowing that any refusal to do so would render him labelled 'that bastard who just wants sex'. No not me, I would never be referred to as 'one of those guys'

In order to counter this friends-zone phenomena, I developed a principle-never date a woman who was not a friend. Such was my ignorance that I would boast and brag with such pride of this principle. In my short-sightenedness I had failed to see the flaw in the plan. Before we became friends, I could not touch her because I didn't know her. Once I was friends with any girl I was in the zone so I was a no-no to her. In short my teenager years were littered with a host of female friends but no girlfriends. I was the King of the Friends-zone and I had so many subjects. It took me many years to see the error in my ways before I abandoned this principle. I then embraced my 'humaness' and 'maness' to the fullest. This was after I noticed that all my subject in the friends-zone had something in common, we listened when the spoke of these 'bastards' but they always went back to them. We basically watched others live life, offering a shoulder to cry on and sound advice. I had to call upon my inner 'bastard' to get off the bench and into the game. I left friends-zone vowing never to return.

Fast-forward some years later, I met the 'one'. She was everything I could hope for in a single human being. She was so perfect she was flawed, those flaws making her all the more perfect. We became friends fast, so fast I still struggle to figure out how that happened. Then I fell. Now came the forked road, keep quiet and begrudgingly stroll back into the friends-zone with no hope of anything coming of it or be forthright early on about my desires and probably lose this person. How does one reject the friends-zone in search for something better without being put in the 'bastards' box? Is the possibility of losing a great friend worth the risk of gaining so much more? How do I show her that the inner 'bastard' now manifested in my actions is a mere mask I wear to get by in life, without being reverted into the friends-zone? How do I seamlessly transition from being just-friends to more than friends with as little change as possible? This business could life, if only there was a manual...