After Hours

Act 1: How I feel about dating apps

Just finished completing a cardinal sin - arranging a date with a stranger only to cancel it. We were meant to go to the museum, we were meant to get lunch, but I had a sinking feeling that I wouldn't really be looking at him, not really. I would be trying to turn a man into an escape route, I would be revving an old car down a familiar highway, to the expense of the highway, in its newness it becomes all scuffed and worn. Why do it again? Again & again & again.

I don't know if its just that I'm not ready for dating again, if I'm still heartbroken from the past (likely candidate), if I'm heartbroken by myself (even more likely) and finally, if my expectations are just too high. Are people as interesting as I need them to be? Do they like me enough for it to matter?

And so on Friday I think I will go to the museum, but alone, and maybe hop to the gallery of contemporary art, and burn lasers from how long I stare at everything. And maybe I won't share it online. Maybe I don't want people to see me anymore, not like this, not in this terrible raw way that makes it feel like my offal are on display. I need time to bandage myself up instead of waiting for someone else to call home and stuff tissue paper in my wounds.

Act 2: A me-shaped hole inside of me

I know loss better than I want to know it. I have lost friends, lovers, opportunities - usually by the brute force of my own hand. I think I'm what they call the "fearful avoidant" or someone with a disorganized attachment style, or as I like to call, a detachment style. I do know myself well, if my clone existed, I know where I'd take him on a date, what I'd call him, what we could talk about. Carl Sagan would be droning on the TV, pastries on the table, kisses on my cheek. The point is that he would probably strangle me for it. Or he would sit and recline for hours without even looking at me. Or he'd cry in private and mourn the fact that he couldn't be normal about any of this.

I have known people so deeply and have made strangers out of them. I don't recognise old photographs, I write poetry about the dead spider in my bathroom in hopes that in another life he knows I love him, I ride out into the countryside and shudder at the Milky Way, I want it to swallow me so whole.

Maybe I should cancel my birthday party. Maybe I should keep my birthday a private affair. (It is the 2nd of October, because I never came first). Maybe I need to submerge my body in the saliva of the ocean and hope I come out the other end clean and ready. Ready for something, ready for my 20s. A new life.

In all this birthday debacle, in this attempt to make a real friend, to talk to people, to be a lover - I just want to start over. Red threads of the past are suffocating me.

Act 3: Virtual mausoleum

Sometimes, wait no, oftentimes, I think about purging my socials. This one doesn't count because unless you know me, or I let you know me, there is no way to tell who James is. What he is, where he goes, what he wears. Whether he is more of a Jamie or a Jim, whether that is really his name at all.

But I do, sickeningly, want to be known. Want to be The World. Want to feel like moonlight, want to relate. Want to stop being alone. Want to stop being lonely.

I want, and want, and want.