Cha Cha Cha

In a small restaurant called Cha Cha Cha on Haight Street in San Francisco, there’s this interesting decoration set-up on a high-up ledge to the right of the bar. It has colorful fans and colorful shapes and figurines that start to blur together in my mind if I try to think too hard about them. I couldn’t look all the way to my right and straight up too often without seeming conspicuously uninvolved in the conversation with the person I came with, but every so often while at the restaurant I would turn and get lost in the odd seemingly mix of cultures that made up the ledge’s décor.

While at Cha Cha Cha, I was drinking red wine sangria, and checking my phone furiously to see whether or not my boyfriend was still awake and texting me or had again fallen prey to the time difference between California and New Jersey. A friend and I had come there together, and after several days of simply enjoying each other’s company while keeping a close eye on our differences and unwillingness to really talk about ourselves or our situation, we found a moment to be genuine.

In suddenly understanding the reason why he had seemed so easy to brush off, I realized my own naiveté. It’s easy to keep yourself from forming a real bond with someone when you keep your understanding of him at surface level. Or when you perceive an unwillingness to open up as a lack of things meaningful enough to open up about. You can simplify a person into reminding you of someone from your past, that’s easy. It makes it easier to keep your own self from opening up, and to put the blame on the other person for not asking you the right questions.

I had a lot of trouble at first understanding how I had come into the maturity to succeed at navigating an open relationship. I didn’t know whether it was a false sense of confidence, or a sudden passing from the realm of strictly emotion-based sex to a more modern understanding as sex as a simple physical act, or the existence of a fulfilling emotional relationship that rendered me unable to form an additional emotional relationship. But I’ve started to come to a new understanding of myself, and it’s been in taking the time to give someone a chance to actually start revealing himself to me that I’ve realized my mistake in trying to simplify. There isn’t an easy answer to anything, and to simplify other people just for the sake of keeping yourself neat and composed is, ultimately, to simplify yourself.

The way your feel about yourself or another person or a situation doesn’t necessarily have to change for things to feel different. And the more you begin to understand that, the easier it is to recognize as things start to move and you start to change.