Trying It On

Recently, I’ve found myself contemplating telling Chatterbox that I love him, and not in the drunken, silly way of that Sunday*. This isn’t because I actually love him because I don’t, not yet. It’s rather that I’m thinking that if I say it, the sentence will be momentarily suspended in mid air - a cloud trail formed by Cupid’s Red Arrow. I can then quickly take a look at it from a distance and decipher how far I am off believing it, or whether I will ever believe it.

But instead of uttering those three little words, I asked Chatterbox whether he ever felt like saying something just so that he could hear himself out loud and see what emotional response it might provoke. And this is what I quite like about him, because he didn’t tell me I was slightly psychotic, pronounce complete incomprehension and dismiss me as ‘being arty’ as has been known by previous entrants to the post of boyfriend, when I'm deemed to have asked something peculiar. He replied in a matter of fact way - “No, but I have tried a colour on a canvas to see whether or not it’s right and then washed over it when it wasn’t”, which struck me momentarily dumb because I guess I just wasn’t expecting an answer that was quite so pretty, or one that showed understanding.

And we all try it on don’t we? From the relatively insignificant trial… who hasn’t shrugged on a man’s jumper to see how it feels? To the rather more significant. Recently, a friend of mine announced that she had sort of been thinking about maybe seeing what it might be like to try for a baby, because she was sort of curious to see how fertile she might be and it could sort of take a while, so maybe she’d have a little try… just to see. The problem being, that either Popeye must have been eating his spinach or Olive Oyl must have been eating her oily fish, because Swee’Pea only needed one pop at the cherry! And of course she wouldn’t want to paint the picture a different colour now, but she's a little wary of the wet paint.

So it’s best I'm a little cautious when ‘trying it on’ I think, not least because at the moment, it’s maybe too early to know if the colour is right and actually I don't much feel like washing my Chatterbox away...

*'That Sunday' http://sistersinthecity.blogspot.com/2007/01/discombobulated_11.html