Still Single

Said to a sleeper, online: “maybe you’ve always been able to get away with discounting the opinions of others, but I will not accept it. I don’t know you, and honestly, I don’t care to. You’re quite honestly the most vacant and uninteresting person I have ever met online. I really don’t know why you continue talking to me. If you see me online, please, just block me, rather than attempting contact.”

I’m thinking I’m still single because I never learned tolerance. How far backwards must I bend just to get a lousy date with someone I find insipid? With someone who doesn’t like robots, or Legos, someone who can’t see the inherent beauty in the world, some sleeper who will never awaken?

Mercifully, I’m twenty-seven. Maybe next year I’ll be desperate enough to weather through inane conversations about pop stars and fast cars and did you see the pants she was wearing. The year after, I can “settle” for a shaggy bison who eats her own weight in bacon while gossipping about imaginary characters on soap opera television. This is what it means to be alone in the twenty-first century.

No. If this is my future, one of servitude to my own fear, fear of solitude, then I reject it.

To you, my greasy, fumbling, floppy-hipped and heart-conditioned future wife: let us never meet. Stay on your couch, watch your soaps, and I’ll find the courage in myself to avoid meeting you. Maybe in waiting I’ll be able to find that nice girl who groks computers and archaeology and deep magic. Better late than never.