THE CYNIC AND THE TOUCHSTONE

by Byron Flitsch

As I got the call to meet Jeff and his girlfriend at a corner bar one night I knew it was coming. Jeff, my best friend of years, the guy that I had dubbed my “Straight Wing Man” was going to tell me the unthinkable. The guy that I could depend on for blunt relationship advice (“Hey, they suck. You don’t.”) was going to blow my mind. When Jeff walked up to me on that cold wet rainy night, hugged me with a smile and told me he proposed to his girlfriend, I was already drunk and needed to get drunker.

See, this wasn’t because I was unhappy. It was actually the opposite. It was more about losing my Cynical Touchstone. I don’t care if you’re a guy or girl or straight or gay we all have a Cynical Touchstone. It’s the one person in our life that refuses to exist in the “world is totally perfect” perspective of a relationship. Great T.V. shows always have them: House from House M.D. and of course Miranda from Sex and the City. And after I had just gotten out of my painful break up from a four and a half year relationship, my Cynical Touchstone was Jeff.

They’re the people we (the ones that are looking for “THE” relationship) meet with to drink away our blues, drown all our sorrows and mirror compare while we say things like: “Look at you, you’re fine. I’ll totally be fine!” Secretly, though, we always know we we’re nothing like our Cynical Touchstones, but constantly admire how they could be strong on their own. How they seemed so confident in the fact that they could and would totally be down with ending up without a significant other for the rest of their lives.

And maybe that was how he ended up in the relationship that I was dreaming of.

When I saw the two of them sitting next to each other that night at the bar, listening to a frat guy strangling out the words to “Don’t Stop Believing” in to the karaoke microphone, I realized what I was doing; what most of us are doing when we depend too much on to our Cynical Touchstone.

I was using him as a distraction to get over the relationship I had just failed. And now my Cynical Touchstone distraction was distracted… by a relationship that was not failing.

When we’re just getting over a break-up, we search for answers. We want to find some sort of solid source of knowledge that will give the wisdom and comic relief we so necessarily deserve, but so definitely distracts us from the real reason we are in search for quick answers… because we don’t want to ask questions like: “What’s next?” And the even bigger question: “Will I find the next great relationship?”

That next morning I woke up with a monster headache, that dry mouth you get after too much beer, and a note that I had some how scratched out in my wasted haze on a back of a bar receipt resting on the pillow next to me that read: “You will be fine.” Somehow, after getting over the shock of how much I drank the night before, I started to believe that I could embark on this new quest to find my next relationship and that maybe my touchstone didn’t have to be cynical or even a stone, but a receipt with a big message and an even bigger bar tab.