Have you ever been on a Stealth Date

 Have you ever been on a Stealth Date?  A Stealth Date is when someone thinks you and one of their friends would be perfect together, so they get both of you to go to something with them, but then your friend either doesn't show or disappears.

It took me 26 years to realize I was on a stealth Date back in 2000.  Mostly because I haven't really thought about that morning or dwelt on it for 26 years.  It's also possible I've been on other Stealth Dates that I wasn't aware of, because it's right there in the name.  Plus, I'm naive, and we Neurodivergents tend to initially take people at face value.  

Winnie, Stephanie, and I were supposed to go to a Street Art Fair one Saturday morning.  We agreed to meet at the Ogilvie Metra Center because they would be taking the Metra downtown.  When I got there, Stephanie said that Winnie had called her earlier and said she couldn't make it.

I didn't think anything of it at the time.  Now Stephanie happened to have forgotten her wallet, so she may or may not have been in on the Stealth Date thing, but I didn't think much about it at the time.  I really only paid for the water taxi downtown and a cup of coffee; she didn't want anything else.  We also somehow skipped the Art Fair and just walked through Crate & Barrel.

The thing is, Stephanie had a boyfriend, so I wasn't even in Pursuit Mode.  I tend to stay in my lane, like that.  I only saw Stephanie one more time that year.  She came to a party I had at my apartment, but didn't stay long.  I don't remember her last name or much about her so I cannot really look her up.  Winnie and I also didn't stay friends.  She was just a little too weird even for me.  

Has it been 17 years already?

This time of year used to make me Wiggy.  Yes, that's the technical term.  It was around this time of year in 2009 when Finance 1.0 left me abruptly.  As the years went by and Time did the Heavy Lifting, along with building a life with Nightingale, I thought less and less about it.  It's really only the Memories on Facebook and a specific Taylor Swift song that ever really make me think of those events.  

When it happened, I told a very small subset of friends -- my inner circle if you will -- what had happened.  But I didn't share with the world until May 1st, 2009, which alwso was on a Friday.  Because somehow not telling anyone made it seem not really.  

From the time D and I broke up until I met Nightingale, I went through a "when I'm alone I want to be with people and when I'm with people I want to be alone" phase.