Patrick and I planned on meeting at a coffee shop over lunch a few blocks away from my office. It’s a unique place that’s several steps up from the franchises that are scattered across the city. Inside, through a glass window, you can see their roasterie. I always loved a good coffee and this particular place was always a hub for the creative types from my office and others to mingle, share ideas, and get work done while being well caffeinated.

When I order I don’t get too creative: just a large drip coffee that I keep black without any additives. That’s one of the things I appreciate about this particular shop’s coffee: the complexity of their flavors, which always vary. Once it cools enough to sip, I can taste something nutty, with a hint of chocolate.

I find a table and sit facing the entrance. When Patrick arrives, I wave and he nods in acknowledgement, waiting in line until it’s his turn to order. He returns with a transparent cup full of what I assume to be their cold brew, with a bit of tan foam from the nitro-infusion bubbling to the surface.

“Hey,” I say. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” he says, smiling. “It’s been a busy week since the concert. It always feels like anytime I step out of the flow of reality for a bit of fun, it always takes a little bit longer to settle back in. How have you been?”

“Good,” I respond and leave it at that.

I can tell that I’m not relaxed and a bit on edge. I’m not sure if this is nervousness or something else. I feel like I’m forcing my smiles and I can’t stop fidgeting with my cup: playing with the sleeve, pulling it up and down. My eyes are dancing around the coffee shop; not distracted, but avoiding eye contact.

He is telling me about what he does: he’s a freelance writer, but I’ve missed the other details.

I could feel that I wasn’t quite there; I wasn’t as present as I wanted to be because frankly I wasn’t in the present. Everything that I was doing was still being viewed through the lense of the past with the weight of my actions on the impending future, each working in tandem to resist and pull me out of this present moment.

Within the past there was the pain of loss; something that I had grown accustomed to, creating an unconscious resistance to all other forms of connection. This was even to a degree projected onto Eleanor, even though my ability to work through that sense of resistance had gotten better over time.

I need to relax. I need to let go.

A piece of that resistance was judgment; a self-imposed judgment on how Veronica might feel about me getting out, making new friends. But more so around how I’m making new connections and how’d she’d feel if she was still here, sick in bed, and unable to get outside to socialize.

The cycles of guilt and shame.

Another piece of resistance is deeper still on an emotional level; a sense and persistence of negativity. There’s a flurry of thoughts running through my head and chief among them is this idea that I can’t make friends—that I can’t connect—because I am broken.

“You mentioned that you have a daughter?” Patrick asks, pulling me back in.

“Yeah,” I say. “She’s six. Her name is Eleanor.”

“That’s a very old school name,” Patricks says.

I look up, meeting his eyes. My fidgeting stops and my scattered thoughts and attention freeze, focus, and align.

Everything is tumbling, wrestling, agitating against one another; trying to push me away from the present back into my constant state of suffering.

I need to let go.

And so I do.

I take a deep breath and apologize, telling Patrick that aside from the concert, this is the first time I have allowed myself to socialize with another adult outside of my parents. Eleanor is my world right now and everything revolves around her, but don’t tell her because even though she wouldn’t understand the idiom, deep down in her subconscious—in her too mature for a six-year old mind—it would definitely go to her head.

Patrick doesn’t have any children, but was always envious of his married friends that did.

“There’s nothing like being a parent,” I tell him. “I had friends with children long before Eleanor came along. Any time one of my friends would hand me their child to hold, it always felt awkward. I didn’t know how to hold them and I would typically stand there, holding them away from me by their armpits, until passing them off to my wife who would cradle them like a professional.

“When Eleanor was born, we ended up having a c-section. At the hospital they had a divider up so that Veronica and myself couldn’t see the procedure, but at some point I heard the doctors say something, so I stood up looking down as they pulled Eleanor out screaming and covered in blood.

“The doctors and the nurses brought her over to the table to clean and let me cut her umbilical cord. They wrapped her in a warm blanket and they handed her to me. It was crazy, maybe even a little bit magical, but when they handed her to me, I took her in my arms, holding her close, and it felt right. It didn’t feel awkward at all. It felt natural and right and it felt like she was where she needed to be.”

The conversation shifts. I tell from the cadence of the conversation that we’re feeling each other out, trying to understand and see the true essence of the other person. It’s a freeing experience; this sense of living fully in the present; surrendering fully to the sense of what is, instead of being locked down by the sense of what was or what could be.

There’s this sense that we have nothing to lose since we just met and we’re able to be clear and transparent in our conversations, because if there’s a sense of incompatibility with this connection and we go our separate ways, there’s no harm, no foul.

Patrick catches me looking at my watch and I apologize, explaining that I need to head back to the office shortly. He laughs and we enter into this awkward phase in our conversation as we try to determine what’s next.

“Do you want to have dinner sometime?” he asks.

I pause, calculating, resistance beginning to bubble up as my defensive mechanisms begin to rise, sheltering myself.

“Look,” Patrick says, “I knew who I was when I was eleven. I know you’re going through some stuff, but you don’t have to be alone. And,” he pauses, “there’s this feeling that I want to get to know you better as you’re figuring out who you are after everything that has happened to you and Eleanor.”

There’s a vulnerability visible in what he just said. I can tell through that exposure of his true self a sense, fear begins to creep in as his eyes shift away from mine and he begins to play with his cold brew’s paper straw that is already starting to deteriorate.

An image comes to mind.

Years ago, shortly after Veronica and I moved into our house, I had decided to plant a tree. When digging the hole, I discovered how rocky our ground was underneath the layers of grass and topsoil. It wasn’t just pebbles, but large, fist-sized rocks, rounded over time.

I remember holding one, feeling the smoothness of its shape, reflecting and wondering how much time it had taken for the rock to receive its shape. And I realized, as I was rubbing my thumb along its surface, that over time I too could shape this rock with my touch; that I could shape this thing that has stood the test of time for millions of years.

This was my power.

And a gift.

Because once I shaped the rock to my desire, I could leave it for another to find and hold meaning to it until they begin to shape it with their hands into something new.

Was I ready to be reshaped?

“Okay,” I say, “but I’m going to cook and you’ll have a chance to meet Eleanor.”

He smiles and we make plans.