Once you’ve transitioned past romantic dry spell to scorched-earth vagina, it isn’t loneliness that’s difficult to contend with. I am quite excellent at being by myself. I have learned to enjoy my own company and when I’m not enjoying it, the world offers plenty of distractions. The difficulty is in the inability to talk about it, the lack of language to explain how you’re looking at your life. No one who cares about you wants to hear that you’ve “given up,” but there aren’t many other ways to describe this strange single purgatory that goes on ad infinitum, yet could theoretically end any second. I am never allowed to talk for long about what’s really going on with me and romance. That makes it a hell of a lot harder to live with. Love and relationships are also, among other things, a marker of time. “Forever” frequently begins in love, though it is theoretically as tenuous as the single state. Looking ahead, if I really am riding this train to the end of the tracks, I don’t see any of the grand events in my future that help ground and timeline human existence, the events being in love provides. After my best friend got married she told me she cried all the next day, overwhelmed by the outpouring of affection from everyone she knew. She deserves it all, but years later, still single, I’ve realized that there will be no similar ceremonious acknowledgment of my life or my relationships with friends and family. Until I’m dead, I guess, but that won’t be very fun for me. Anchoring my existence without the signposts of commitment, or children, is a lot of work, and sometimes I feel myself giving up on it, drifting off into a grey directionless space in danger of floating completely away. I know when I try to tell a friend that I think I will be alone forever, they are imagining bleakness. They want it to stop. They want to give advice without acknowledging the subtext of offering a solution to my “problem.” The underlying message in those platitudes is that I need to just keep on wishing and hoping and waiting. Just wait, and wait, because something better than the life you have is guaranteed. Love is guaranteed. But it’s not, is it? Not at all, not even for someone like me, who they maybe think is cool, reasonably attractive, and not obviously insane. I wanted to cry at that dinner table, because keeping up the farce that I’m still waiting means staying still. It means diminishing the life I do lead, which is a good one. I’ll never be free to say that I’m alone forever, only that I’m in a holding pattern until real life begins.
Aimée Lutkin When Can I Say I’ll Be Alone Forever?
