It was my first Christmas in California.
I had met him just a few months
prior to that night.

He seemed so sweet,
and so quirky at the same time.
And seeing someone else, of course.

That’s always the way it is in my life.
Like a magnet for married men,
I attract them like flies to a picnic.

Ah, but he was a charmer!
Blue eyed blonde, about my age,
athletic, and even played the guitar.

We were a perfect match, I thought;
me, a singer, songwriter, poet, and
him, a charming, quirky guitarist.

We went caroling with the music club
in which I had first met him.
He hadn’t told his girlfriend about us… yet.

She had to have known! All women know
when their men have wandering eyes.
She knew. Indeed, she knew his nature.

Just like all the men I attract, he was another
Romeo. A cad who loved women in general,
but no one in particular. Just another user.

I hate that about him now, though I know
it was nothing malicious. He was, like the others,
just a broken man who learned love the wrong way.

But that night, I was convinced he would be
my second husband. I sure know how to pick ‘em!
Charmers, like rattlesnakes disguised as men.

It’s never me that approaches them, but perhaps
it should be! Though, come to think of it,
that has never worked out either.

I am still single nearly thirty years after I divorced
in court, and more than thirty years since I divorced him
in my heart – that man who never was MY husband.

I don’t quite understand why no man has ever been mine.
Not that I need ownership, or that I tend too much toward
jealousy – then again, maybe I do. I don’t know.

I see couples all around me who are happy together.
Often, they’re attractive men with just so-so women,
and sometimes they’re not so handsome with real beauties.

I see how comfortable they are with one another.
Why can’t I have that, and also have the thrill of passion
at the same time? The electricity I felt with all the married ones!

I’m old now, though. Old enough to have too many incomplete projects
and not really enough time to take care of a man.
That’s my excuse for all these Christmases alone.