I'd say that the title says it all, but it doesn't. Not even close.

I'm sure you've been clutching your soul where the Rory-Shaped-Hole in your life caused by my absence has been cut. Put ice on it and apply pressure to stop the bleeding. It's gonna be OK.

Women.

If there's one thing that can distract a man from paying bills, remembering to gas up the car, purchasing groceries, getting plenty of fluids, eating, walking, sleeping, and other assorted present-participles, it's women. Or men if you're gay. But for most men, it's women.

There's this girl.

When you see that sentence, it means trouble. Nothing simple ever came from "There's this girl."

I haven't had a single, healthy relationship since breaking up with Aydika in December of 2005. That's a long time to go without experiencing a relationship built on trust and affection. Nearly everything since Aydika has involved being some girl's sexual fantasy or being some girl's Other Man. Sometimes it was both.

Imagine spending month after month after month getting involved with girls who are cheating on their Others. Or feeling like they've built this other person up around you - someone they want you to be - and then taking off when they've had their fill of fantasyland, never actually getting to know you.

Throw in a good deal of intense personal problems, and you have Me.

With two exceptions, I haven't let anyone anywhere near the ol' heart.

The current exception is... this girl.

I've been hanging out with her since October. At first it was spotty, seeing her once a week at most, but usually less. By January, though, we were getting to be rather close.

She's the first one I haven't turned and ditched at the first sign of the possibility of a relationship.

I'm at my most comfortable when I'm up in front of people. The more people I'm talking to, the better. I hold court at parties and do what Rory does - I give anecdotes, converse in an amusing fashion, flirt, and charm. It turns out that women find flirting and charm to be indicators that a guy wants more to do with them. I was so uninterested in relationships, though, that it wouldn't even occur to me until the party thinned out and I was left with one girl, still listening to Rory, giving me those Looks that girls give when they'd like to, you know, take the party someplace else.

That's when I'd split. Like I said, I'm at my most comfortable talking to groups. They're safe. You can't very well accidentally fall into a romantic situation with a group. At least not at the kind of parties I go to.

But... this girl. I only ran away once. It was in early January while I was in my Cigarettes and Alcohol phase. She came over one night, we drank, we goofed around, played guitar at each other, and then, exhausted, fell asleep on the sofa together.

It had been a long, long time since I'd last fallen asleep next to someone I was close to. I'm entirely accustomed to sleeping alone. So accustomed to it that, when I woke up a few hours later as the sun was coming up, my still half-asleep brain registered the presence of a body next to me. I was still too groggy to have remembered who this person was - all I knew was that I wasn't alone.

I leapt off the couch. Up on my feet, I began to pace. And pace. And pace and pace and pace.

I looked at her and went over the events of the night in my head. We hadn't even Done It - we really did just sleep next to each other, but to my emotionally shell-shocked brain, this was about as intimate as Doing It would have been.

I remembered our conversation before falling asleep. She was asking all sorts of personal questions - things I hadn't talk about with anybody in almost two years. When I'm around people, I present them with what I'm comfortable sharing, and I do it intensely enough that they don't even have a chance to ask anything else.

But this girl... she asked, and I answered.

I felt embarrassed. Looking at her on the sofa, I felt like I had done this Horrible Thing, and that there was no fixing it. She knew Stuff about me, and it made me vulnerable. This girl now had my trust and true affection, and that meant she could hurt me.

I wanted her gone. Not because I didn't care for her - it was the opposite - I wanted her gone because cared for her.

She woke up a little while after me, put on her shoes, and went home.

I didn't call. I didn't text. I didn't want to see her. I was doing my running away thing.

It didn't work. My fear of the situation was proportional to the strength of my feelings for her. So, when the opportunity to see her again came up, I went for it.

We talked about that night, and managed to resolve the weirdness, returning our friendship back to the neutral state in which it began. At least it looked that way.

As is probably already clear, we've spent more and more time together, and we've gotten closer and closer.

This is the closest I've been to anyone since Aydika and I split.

When I'm not around this girl, she's on my mind. I think about her all day. I want to call and text and email and see her. When I'm around her, I want to bring her things - little gifts and crap like that. I'm doing all the things a guy does when courting.

I didn't plan any of it. The courting behaviors aren't a conscious thing. I just have this powerful instinct to do whatever I can to make her happy and comfortable.

We finally hit the point where we had to decide what we were going to do with each other. In my mind, a relationship like this begins with that first nervous kiss. It's the signal that you're ready to dedicate yourself to this thing.

Instead, we've talked about it, and we've decided we're both in the wrong place to start a relationship. She has a lot to deal with right now. I've accidentally started a business. She likes camping, and I like shopping. In terms of lifestyle, we seem wholly incompatible.

We went out to dinner last night and had what felt like the final conversation about all this Stuff. Halfway through, she said, "It feels like we're breaking up, but we haven't even kissed."

That summed it all up. We're so scared of getting into this thing, but our feelings for each other are right out in the open. I don't know if we stopped it because of the reasons we gave, or if the reasons we gave were just rationales to avoid getting any further into something that could easily end in both of us getting hurt.

I used to think I knew everything about women that I needed to know, but it's become evident to me this past month that I don't know anything. In the past, for the most part, I got what I wanted. I had no fear when it came to women. I realize now that the reason it was so easy was that I didn't really care.

For the first time since Aydika, I have a girl stuck in my head. I can't write. I haven't been able to converse with anyone, as I inevitably turn the subject to Her. When I'm out, I think about how much better everything would be if she were out with me.

She fell asleep on the sofa with me again on Friday night, and it was the greatest thing I've felt in over two years. I stayed up as long as I could, trying to get as much as I could out of that experience, because knew that it probably wouldn't happen again.

I'm in trouble.