Broken Doll

I

want

to

SCREAM

I swear to god the universe is fucking with me on purpose.

I finally feel something.  My withered soul was just starting to breathe again.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt anything enough to cry.

Clearly someone’s telling me to just go back into my hole and stay there.

I don’t think I’ve clicked with someone through cyberspace alone quite so well since I was in college, and unscarred, unscathed, unjaded.  Naive.  Open.  Fearless.  I did make some great friends then.  And some bad ones.  Nearly all of them long-distance, and most in a foreign country.

I try to calm the flutter of excitement with a wait-and-see approach.  Calm.  Wait.  Watch.  Nothing is promised yet and anything can happen.

And yet there is that ease of conversation, the easy laugh, the light-hearted teasing, and the flirtation and the smiles evolve all on their own.  That flow, that dance.  I forget to hesitate, I choose to be less cautious.  I want.

I fear.

I hope.

The perils of internet “dating”:

Calling it “dating” leads to the peculiar assumption that we’re going to skip right over the “hello, we are complete and total strangers” part, and go straight for the “I can’t get you out of my head; I’ve been thinking about you for three days straight” part.

True story, that was the second message I got from this guy; when I hadn’t even logged in yet to receive his first, much less respond to it.

Creepy.

This is why I hate this shit. 

Sit on Santa’s Lap naughty giveaway.

There ya go.

Not great, but okay. After abandoning the whole idea of OKCupid for a year and a half, I am attempting again, for lack of better options.  I put myself out there, in the real world, but whatever new people I meet are either not interested, not interesting (in that way), or taken.  So.

Aside from the obvious trolls, messages from OKCupid make me feel obligated to respond, just in case, to cast the net wider even if I’m not really seeing the potential for this particular person. And honestly I don’t like that.  Even simple conversations suck up hours of time to conduct via email —  for someone who may or may not even be committed enough to show up for an in-person meet.  I’m committing a lot of energy for, probably, very little return.  I’d much rather let this stuff happen naturally in the course of committing my energy to the stuff I already commit it to, in public spaces, meeting people in the course of doing my art and living my life — two birds with one stone — except it apparently doesn’t work.

There is a coldness, an emptiness, to my day-to-day that isn’t filled by the stuff that crams my schedule.  I still come home to an empty house. Most often I have very little reason to leave it.  I miss the love that isn’t there.  I miss having a reason that isn’t motivated almost entirely by a need to pay the rent.

And for those who message me, who I respond to just in case, and yet it makes me uneasy because the conversation, the progress, the plan is not in my control. I didn’t select him; I have no plan, no contingencies, for how to direct him to a comfortable and safe face-to-face meeting.  If he doesn’t mention photography, the photo club is out.  If he says he’s agnostic, the spiritual groups are out.  Kink demo for a first meeting?  Possible, but hardly ideal — too loaded.  And, well, there’s not much else.

There’s no way to get completely away from the artificiality, and it makes things awkward, makes me uncomfortable, and makes me want to pull away and give up without even trying.

There’s not many good ones left… if any at all.  This should have been settled years ago.  I should have been given that chance.

I am not close to anyone, except my mother. Not even as friends. No one knows my heart.

It makes me softly sad.