My Free Will is gone. This is nothing new. My friends call us an "on-and-off-again" couple, but what they don't understand is that I need him. You see, I can't decide without him.
It started when I was little. (No, when I was college.) I have trouble deciding on things. It's like a mechanism in me is broken, or missing, or lost, or stolen, or destroyed. You get the picture.
Restaurants are the worst. (Though, Starbucks is pretty bad.) Whenever I go to a restaurant, the menu choices just stop me dead in my tracks. I could go with the Beef and Broccoli (it has vegetables) or the Shrimp and Snow-Peas (it has shrimp and vegetables). But how to decide? Sometimes, the waiter just gives me some more time. But usually, I just end up asking for the waiter's recommendation. How embarrassing.
I thought about seeing a therapist, but I couldn't decide which one to see. Not to mention, the question "How does that make you feel?" would just send me reeling. I was spiraling downward. (Or out of control.)
That's when I met Will.
I loved Will. Being with him made me better. All of a sudden, I could decide on things. Food, movies, even Starbucks—nothing was off limits! It was simple. Whenever Will saw I had trouble deciding on something, he stepped in to help me out. If we were in a restaurant, for example, and I couldn't decide between the beef or the shrimp, he'd just let the waiter know that "She'll have the Sweet and Sour Chicken." Brilliant!
Will helped me out everywhere. He helped me decide at Starbucks ("Venti coffee, black"), Blockbuster ("Apocalypse Now"), and other places ("doggy style"). It was an amazing relationship. I felt the happiest, most decisive I had ever felt since, well, since either birth or college.
But then Will left. He couldn't stay tied down, he explained, because he was free. I'm not sure if I thought he was full of shit or totally dreamy because of this, but I let him leave to do his "Free Will" thing.
Alone again, I went back to my usual antics, like holding the same two books in my hands for upwards of 35 minutes at the bookstore. I had tried weighing the pros and cons of each, but I soon found that I had trouble deciding whether "this book is about vampires" was a pro or a con.
Will did eventually come back to me. He found me crying over a spork on my futon. (Things had gotten pretty bad.) He told me that he had spent enough time searching. You see, Will had been fighting his own indecisiveness. During all of that time he was away, he had been trying to decide between Louise, Erika, Julia, Mia, Claire, and even (get this!) Joey.
Even still, I was glad to see him. I could finally watch a television show from start to finish without flipping channels. That alone was worth another go.
But, he reminded me, Free Will was still free. That was something that I had to respect. So, every once and awhile, I had to let him have his Free Will Time. I told him that I needed to decide if I was okay with that.
"Of course you're okay with it," he told me.
We were back!











