If you’d like to jump straight to the closing thoughts of the 4 date stories —> Closing thoughts: 4 date stories.

Intro

I warn you - this is the longest story out of the four coming off with a 9,000+ word count so here’s a TLDR in case you’re not bothered enough to read my blabber.

October 2021 - I met someone I had a gut feeling about from the get go. What kind of gut feeling? That it could be something special.
We had a unique first encounter. Hopefully won’t have one as short again.
She told me we should be friends a few weeks in. I was too daft to fully understand that and was holed up in my own mirage for far too long. I then cut her off for a bit..
Before I came to New York and we hung out for a few times. It was immediately clear that the gal I thought I had gotten over was actually the gal I was still very much into. Slight miscalculation there, buddy.
Near the end of my Jan New York visit, I cut her off with the hope that I could one day look at her the same way she looked at me - as 100% platonic friends.
April 2022 - I published a version of this few months after and she was the first to read it. She didn’t like it and cut off all contact. This was around 3 months ago.
July 2022 - Over the July 4th weekend, I just decided to smash out a few sessions and get this done.

If you’d still like to read on, here we go.

This is delayed. I released a version of this 3 months ago but quickly withdrew it. Cara didn’t like it and I don’t think it was fair to have a public version. Apologies to the (few) people who emailed me asking why the link to the essay wasn’t working. I was kinda fucked up by Cara’s reaction and I’m sorry I didn’t reply to those messages.

I’m releasing this a few months after because I already had 90% of the essay drafted and wanted to smash this out to reflect what I learned about myself. I really did like her. It is weird to write about someone who’s not in your life. The reality is I did want to keep her around in my life and it’s probably the reason why I put myself off finishing this. Given the amount of time that’s passed, I think it’s been a constructive reflection session. I’m a very imperfect human.