Auggie’s Fireflies

Photo by Jerry Zhang on Unsplash

So, I met this fellow online. It was right after I started online dating in early 2017. Richard. I hate that name Richard. He was interesting, intelligent, funny, witty… it’s the wit that usually attracts me the most. He was crazy funny, and corny as hell. I’d use the word eccentric, but he’s way too much fun for the images conjured up by that word. Class clown maybe? He had an excellent vocabulary. He used words that I hadn’t heard before. I gauged him to be at least as intelligent as me and probably more so. That doesn’t happen very often. I was delighted.

I liked Richard. I spent a lot of time thinking about Richard. He was married, still, to a woman that had left him five years previous. He stayed married, he explained, so his oldest son could stay on his health insurance. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but so be it. It didn’t matter much to me because Richard wasn’t a “keeper”. I occasionally thought he might be a keeper; he would occasionally surprise me with something he said that was exceptionally witty or profound. But, for the most part, Richard was a fun guy to talk to. A fun guy to spend time with. I knew we’d be friends for a long time. We had that chemistry for certain. We were kindred spirits in many ways.

A couple of weeks after connecting online, we met for our first liaison. That day, I must have been thinking Richard might just be a keeper, which always made…