Last Night

Well.

Crap.

I've been running over this in my head all morning, and I've seriously considered lying to you all about it, but I know that I've just got to be honest.

Damn it.

I spoke too soon.

I got my hopes up too high.

Last night was the first, and last date that I will have with Irish.

I consider myself to be a fairly intuitive person, but when I started feeling a change in his voice over the phone on Monday night, I wrote it off to nerves and paranoia. As I wrote yesterday, I knew that the moment I saw him again, things would become more clear to me.

They did.

But not for the better.

There was a distance there from the moment that he pulled up to my house. There was a vaguely uncomfortable peck hello, while I struggled to maintain my good mood and my optimism. I figured maybe he was just nervous and overwhelmed like I was and he was handling it differently.

In the car, my heart started pounding like it had done by the end of my three miles yesterday, and it didn't let up.

Over dinner, we started discussing relationships - those past and those possible. For some reason, I felt like there was something major at stake there, and my heart just kept pounding.

Back at my house, we watched a little TV, my heart racing the entire time. I kept waiting for something. I didn't know what, but I felt like there was another shoe that was going to drop and I was just waiting for it to happen.

Eventually, it dropped.

Boy, did it ever.

I'm not sure if I mentioned that he's Catholic, but it's that little fact that sent all my thoughts and hopes tumbling to the ground.

I wasn't being paranoid. Something had changed in him. He had made a decision, but was having a hard time admitting to it. He had decided that he can't deal with the fact that I don't share his religious convictions, and it isn't worth it to him to even explore what we could have had.

He even said it to my face, that he could see himself in a relationship with me, that it would be so easy. But he couldn't do it knowing that eventually the religion thing might get in the way.

Being the stubborn bastard that I am, I didn't want to give up. I tried to argue with him. I tried to reason. I tried to talk him into just giving it a chance. But it was useless. There's just nothing to do about it.

The only thing I have to be thankful for is that he did it now and he didn't drag it out for months until I was in way too deep, like The Ex did.

But now I just feel like I lost something. Well, not something, but the possibility of something. It feels sort of empty.