The following is a work of memoir. It reflects my present recollections of past experiences, events, and conversations. Certain names, locations, and characteristics have been changed, and some events and dialogue have been compressed.

Believe

So there I was, caught red-handed ogling the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my life’s lovely lady lumps. That’s not what happened, sure, but I could only imagine how it must have looked from her perspective. For all she knew I was a depraved peeper, getting my perverted jollies off as I imagined her body bare, trying to picture what kind of belly button she had, and guesstimating the circumference of her areolas. As she continued towards my register my heart sank into my stomach, and I got the feeling this was going to be something I would never be able to come back from. Getting closer, she let her eyes meet mine, and she gave me a stern look as she approached my register. After making eye contact for a fleeting second I hurriedly darted my eyes in a completely different direction. After a few seconds letting my eyes wander, I promptly looked back in her direction, and so we began ‘the dance.’ 

 

It’s a ‘dance’ I’m forced to do with almost everyone I interact with, due to the fact I can’t maintain eye contact to save my life. As I looked back at Piper, she was still looking at me, and my eyes met hers for a second time before I quickly averted my gaze once more. It’s like when I start talking with someone in person, I feel the need to look them in the eye, both out of respect and because that’s what normal people do. But, when the figurative poop hits the fan and my eyes actually meet theirs, alarms start blaring in my head, my anxiety skyrockets to Defcon I, and before I know it my fight or flight response starts to kick in. Suddenly, making eye contact with that person feels like the most excruciating form of torture you can imagine, and maintaining it becomes harder than defeating a final boss in Elden Ring with your eyes closed. With no other choice I’m forced to look away for some reprieve and to regain the ability to think straight, but if we’re still talking once the heat dies down I start thinking how I really ought to look the person talking to me in the eye proper, so I try to look back at them and it starts all over again.

 

The process of systematically looking at, away from, and then back at the person I’m talking to is what I call ‘the dance’, and it lasts either as many times as it takes for me to look back and see them avoiding eye contact, or until our interaction has finished. I always used to think my inability to make eye contact was just a byproduct of my shyness and extremely low confidence, but at 18 my world was shook when I learned that it was actually due to Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of autism I’d been unknowingly harboring inside me my entire life. My need to do this ‘dance’ with every person I speak to certainly made going through school a challenge, but fortunately I rarely had issues at work, as after working there for almost five years, most of the people I talked to either knew about my timid ways already or could easily pick up on my social ineptitude while speaking to me, and then concede in their attempts at making eye contact in order to avoid any potential awkwardness between us, allowing me to breathe easy. I learned immediately, however, that Piper was NOT one of these people.

 

She finally reached my register, refusing to break eye contact with me all the while. I had undoubtably committed a folly of biblical proportions against this illustrious dame, and I thought surely, life as I knew it was over. Feeling as though I might piddle a bit in my trousers, I swallowed my pride, accepted my calamity, and braced myself in an attempt to withstand whatever sort of wrath this dazzling dame was about to unleash upon me. I thought maybe she’d slap me, maybe she’d humiliate me, or maybe she’d call me out in front of the whole store. That’s when something happened that caught me off-guard entirely, and left me positively bamboozled: while maintaining constant eye contact, she proceeded to bestow upon me the biggest, warmest, most brilliant and life-affirming smile I’d ever seen.

Full-toothed, ear-to-ear, and entirely genuine; it was that luminous, one-in-a-billion type of beaming grin that only the most profoundly special type of human will share with a complete stranger for no particular reason. Heartwarming and soul-stirring in equal measure, it’s a type of smirk I’d only before seen on the kindest and best person I’ve ever known; my mother. Except even she didn’t go around flashing that type of smile at randoms like she knew them. “Hey, I’m Piper!” She proudly proclaimed with an almost alarming amount of jubilation as she reached out her one free arm, and placed her hand before me. She spoke with all the confidence of a car salesman and the perkiness of a Golden Retriever puppy. Expecting to get put on blast, her exceedingly pleasant demeanor and ginger tone caught me completely off-guard. I looked at her positively dumbfounded before looking down in what was supposed to be a momentary glance at her outreached hand, but soon turned into another brazen stare once I laid eyes upon the glorious appendage.

 

I couldn’t help but notice her nails. She wore them astoundingly short and well trimmed, without leaving even a sliver of white stuff at the ends. This was in stark contrast to nearly every other female I saw anywhere who wore positively repugnant long nails day-in and day-out. Fake or real, it didn’t matter, they were both riddled with the same amount of ungodly, abhorrent bacteria, germs, and god-knows-what other types of biohazard waste underneath that made me want to heave my lunch in repulsion. It’s a scientific fact that it’s one of the dirtiest places on the human body, and even if they washed their hands like seclusion-era Howard Hughes, with long nails it’d simply be futile. I found the fact they were the norm to be positively lamentable. But clearly, Piper was the exception, with the most pristine and sterile-looking mitts I’d ever seen on a female. With that level of manicure, I thought, she clearly took pride in sensible, sanitary fashion. She might even, I thought, be a germaphobe like me, and with that plausibility, along with her smile and stare, the roots of my attraction to her grew even deeper. After a brief pause I managed to pick my jaw up off the floor as I quickly realized I was just sitting there, staring scrupulously at Piper’s unsoiled extremity. I quickly looked up to meet her continued stare and smile, and while continuing to avoid eye contact I tried my damndest to give her the most real, uncreepy smile I could right back. Hesitating slightly, I extended my arm out, gently grasped her outreached hand, and I looked directly at the floor as I shook her hand with all the tenacity of a pool noodle. I melted at the feeling of my skin meeting hers, but managed to keep the rhythm of the interaction going.

 

I cleared my throat, and responding with as much gusto as I could muster, I said, “Thanks. Um, hi, I’m Mullarkey.” I glanced up for another instant to see that she was still smiling and staring at me, and immediately looked away once more. It was a little mumbled, I randomly said “thank you” for no apparent reason , and it was definitely not my best delivery, but with someone of her caliber I was just glad it was audible. Her porcelain skin was warm, effortlessly sleek and soothing, in striking contrast against my rock hard, cracked and calloused hands I got every winter from the low humidity and washing my hands so often. After a few seconds I’d have done anything to make an eternity, she loosened her grip and tenderly recoiled her arm. Our game of eyeball chicken never did end during all of this, as I bounced my line of sight back and forth with hers throughout the entire interaction. She held her arresting smile throughout as well, and just as steadfast. In time I would get to know this tantalizing one-two combo of hers as her personal signature that I would affectionately come to refer to as her trademark “Smile n’ Stare”, and she gave it to me every single time I saw her in the store from that first day on. Radiant, unwavering, and altogether spellbinding, it was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and just one of the many things that makes her so special.

 

She replied, “Hehe, nice to meet you! I work on the floor, so you’ll probably run into me a lot.” with a smile somehow bigger than the last, she adjusted her hold on the pile of returns in her arm for a better grip, bracing them against her side.

 

Not wanting to delay her another second, I rushed to blurt out, “Uh, it’s uh… I’m mostly up here at the registers… Thanks!” I knew this was my last chance, so I forced my chin up, and did everything in my power to look into her eyes. I only managed to lock eyes for a moment, but dear lord was it a heavenly moment. I always thought I hated making eye contact with everyone, but the way she held it when I looked at her, it was somehow different. Rather than judgement and ridicule, her eyes in mine brought comfort and reassurance that all was not bad in this world.

 

Take the sensation of looking down as the chain slowly pulls you up during the rickety part of a giant roller coaster, right before reaching the big drop at the top, the chill that crawls up your spine when you’re wandering around the woods alone in the dead of night, and the jitters that keep you up when you’re trying to fall asleep the night before you have a huge speech to give in front of the whole class that’s worth a quarter of your final grade. Condense the tense, exciting, and altogether scary feelings from all of these things into an electrically intense couple of seconds, and that’s what it felt like to maintain eye contact with Piper.

 

“Cool! See you around!” she said with a little wave and a smile, as she turned around and headed for the floor.

 

“Sorry. Byyye!” I said with a dull whimper, waving to her backside as she turned. Somehow the words “Thanks” and “Sorry” seemed to worm their way into everything I said to anyone at work like a virus, but I let it slide, as I figured there were worse habits I could have picked up. As I watched her walk away I realized that I was as awkward with her as I’d been with anyone, and still somehow I remained wholly unshaken, and my mind completely sound. If this brief exchange had been with any other pretty girl, the aftermath would be another story entirely. I would preform an extensive mental autopsy of everything I said and did, as was customary after every high stakes social interaction. Picking apart each minuscule aspect, I’d surely find something wrong with my every word, tone, pronunciation, and facial expression. I would dwell on my mistakes, grieve myself over them for days to come, and crank the self-loathing up to a ‘7’. But for some inexplicable reason I don’t even know how to put into words, I didn’t have any of that with her. There’s just something special about her, and it goes far beyond her physical refinement.

 

Something about her that kept my rampant worries of inadequacy at bay, and put my fears of what horrible things she might be thinking of me to rest almost completely. Something about the resolute confidence in her demeanor, and the innate compassion that shone through the tender softness of her voice like the sun through the dissipating clouds after a rainy day. With it, she effectively reassured my unyielding neurosis that “It’s going to be okay” with her every word. Interacting with Piper wasn’t just delightful, it was liberating. It unshackled me from my crippling self doubt, and in doing so removed much of the tension between us. Not only did this make me more comfortable around her, but made her the single most intriguing person in the world to me as well. 

 

It didn’t take long at all for me to develop a limerence for Piper the likes of which I had never before known. I wanted to marinate in her enchanting jaded gaze, spend all of eternity embraced in her perfectly manicured hands, and climb right inside that captivating kisser and live within its soothing ivory walls for the rest of my days. I may have just spoken to her for a couple minutes that day, but it was a couple minutes that made me want to start really living again. After that meeting I left work feeling newly curious, uncharacteristically optimistic, and altogether befuddled by this kind-hearted, red-haired goddess that came from the misses section. Her confidence was infectious, her aurora was radiant, and after that day her rockin’ bod and silky scarlet headdress were but footnotes in what I found to be Piper’s real attraction.

 

 

Status Quo

After that day I started seeing Piper around the store regularly, and even on days we didn’t get the chance to make small talk I could always at least count on catching one of her signature smile n’ stares in passing. That gentle, innate kindness, that hearty smile, that prolonged eye contact – I got addicted to these things like a drug. They became my cocaine, and I would have done anything to keep seeing them a couple days a week. I became petrified that something outside of my control would bring it all to an end, or that I might abruptly end it one day by deciding I wanted to try to get something more than I already had with her, and in a lapse in judgement give her a compliment, attempt to have a real conversation with her, or do anything more complicated than smile, wave, or say a simple “Hey, how are you?”.

 

I’d wanted to sweep Piper off her shapely feet and make her my passionate lover from the second I first laid eyes on her, but between how much I cherished what I already had with her, and the fear of losing it, I decided what I had was enough. It wasn’t much at all, but it meant the entire world to me nonetheless, and I would have done anything to keep it, even if that meant never having anything more with her. In this way I grew complacent, and did all I could to suppress my attraction for her, managing to all but convince myself to abandon the dream of making Piper mine. Just to be safe, I made sure to keep every interaction I had with her as brief as possible, and entirely superficial.

 

 

The Walls of Jericho Crumble

The days of running into Piper at work every week were feckin’ glorious, but they weren’t meant to last. After nearly a year of being reinvigorated regularly by Piper’s trademark smile n’ stares, my worst fears became realized when I heard in passing from another co-worker that she had gotten a better job at the bank across the street, and had put in her two weeks at the store. My world came crashing down, and my heart sunk into my stomach. I clenched my fists, took a deep breath, and tried not to make a scene, reminding myself that I was just an acquaintance to her. I was absolutely devastated, and furious at myself for not making any attempts to become more than friends with her while I still had the opportunity. In a last ditch effort at salvaging something, anything remotely resembling a friendship with this fiery enchantress, I sent her a friend request on Facebook.

 

As laughably pathetic a move as it was, I sure felt like a real jim-dandy when she accepted it a few days later, and like the proper creep I was, I proceeded to scroll through her entire profile, and checked out all her photos. Her relationship was set to “Single,” but I decided not to take that as gospel, as a girl like her could have easily had any man she wanted. She didn’t have many comments, posts, photos, or too much of anything on her profile, and never seemed to post about anything either.

 

This was in stark contrast to my page, which consisted of hundreds of photos from family events over the years, regularly shared movie quotes, and plenty of check-ins at the local theater that I insisted on posting every time I went to a movie. After getting my fill of her profile, I left her page and let the dream of being with her fade away as the days without seeing her became weeks, and then months, until one day she came back into the store, but this time as a customer. 

 

I felt like I would have done anything to get just one more smile n’ stare, but stopped in my tracks and turned around as she came up to return something alongside a tall, swole man I’d never seen before. I didn’t know if it was her friend, boyfriend, brother, uncle, or dad, but I told myself he was the guy she was banging every night, in multiple positions. Another worker helped her, and it all happened so fast. Not sure what move to make, I ended up just standing there with my back to her until she left. Like the coward I was, I pretended like I didn’t even notice her because all I could think about was the mister burly britches guy she was with. Knowing that may have been the last time I’d see her for another few months or years and I let it slip through my fingers, I became deflated. There was a brief period of intense self-loathing after that night, but after a few weeks I did my best to let my memory of the prettiest girl ever fade into obscurity. After that day weeks whizzed by like snowflakes past a windshield during a late night drive in the dead of winter, until it was the day before my 30th birthday.

 

 

The Pact

Although it’s true I’ve desired nothing more than a kiss, a cuddle, and a girlfriend from the moment my ballocks descended, it wasn’t until I legally became an adult in November of my senior year that I really started to feel a sense of urgency about it. I spent my teenage years assuming I’d experience all of these things in due time, as all young people did; I need only live my life and wait patiently for it to happen. Everything changed the day I turned 18 and was still without, however, as I was no longer just an inexperienced boy, I was a virgin freak; a grown man who’s never kissed or cuddled. To me, there was nothing worse. I could vote, get drafted, serve on a jury, get a Costco card, and buy a pack of Marlboro Lights, but I still had yet to know the warmth of a woman’s touch.

 

I wasn’t just upset by this reprehensible revelation, I dwelled on it for months like a terminal cancer diagnosis. My newfound manhood had come to me rank with shame and regret, and with it I was cast into the suffocating throws of a deep and crippling depression the likes of which I had never before known. I stopped playing video games and watching movies, started spending all of my free time sleeping, and over time my grades began to plummet. By the beginning of March lady melancholy had only pulled me deeper into her clutches, and late one cold and lonely spring night I swallowed a whole mess of pills in a brash and impulsive attempt at taking my life.

I don’t remember many of the specifics of that dreadful night, but something that will remain engrained in my memory until the day I die is the look on my mother’s face when I first opened my eyes the following morning. The hellish night had passed, and I found myself lying in a hospital bed at the break of dawn with an i.v. jammed into my arm. My mother sat directly next to me, in a hospital chair she had pulled as close as she could get to my bedside. Still in her pajamas and her hair in complete disarray, the woman who raised me, and the person I so often referred to as ‘my BFF’ sat there with her winter coat hastily wrapped around her frail body as she leaned back, arms crossed, and just stared blankly into the distance. Clearly fighting the sleep behind her eyes in an effort to be awake the moment I was, she wasn’t crying, but from her puffy red eyes and the countless wet streams reflecting light off her cheeks it was evident she had simply run out of tears to cry.

 

Appearing equally as exhausted as she was devastated, the disheveled expression she wore across her face was one I’d never seen on her before. I was with her the day she collapsed onto the floor as she was told over the phone that her sister had just died, and sat beside her several times at the vet as we watched our beloved pets breathe their last breath, but her expression that morning was somehow more dire and drained than ever before. I didn’t just break her heart that night, I broke her. I came to an understanding after that night that if not for any other reason, I must never, ever try to kill myself again, if only for the sake of my beloved mother.

 

With a lot of hard work, a brief stay at an inpatient mental facility, a lot of help from a lot of people, many rounds of CBT, and a myriad of new drugs flowing through my system, I managed to come away from my suicide attempt with a newfound respect for life, and once again found reason in keeping up with the daily grind… That is, until the arrival of my 19th birthday began to rear its ugly head later that year, and I began to lose my reason just as quickly as I’d found it.

 

With another major milestone looming on the horizon and about to pass me by, still absent my proverbial first kiss, cuddle, and girlfriend, I started to lose faith once again, and succumbed once more to an immense and crippling depression. Every day closer it got to my birthday, my mind became more and more clouded, as I became more and more consumed with the fact that I was going to be an elderly 19-year-old, still completely and utterly kissless and cuddleless. The first time the word ‘suicide’ popped into my head again, however, so too did connotations triggering the memory of my mother’s face after that abominable night the year before when I tried to kill myself, and nearly killed her in the process.

 

I knew then that I needed to take a stand and make lasting changes to how I viewed my birthdays, lest I try to commit suicide every single year that passes that I still didn’t have these firsts. So, a week or two away from my 19th birthday, I racked my brain for any sort of solution to putting this annual blight to rest once and for all. Short of actually receiving my first kiss, first cuddle, and first girlfriend, however, I quickly came to the realization there was no permanent solution, and that the most I could hope to achieve on my own was delay my impending dismay, rather than eliminate it altogether.

 

Because if, God forbid, any more birthdays were to pass me by in the near future before I got the chance to earn any of these notches on my belt, I agreed that getting suicidal about it would be a gravely irresponsible overreaction. I would also say, however, that getting these firsts really was, literally, the most important thing in the world to me, and saying I couldn’t be so devastated if I still didn’t have them by, say, something like my 50th birthday, would be equally as unreasonable. I figured the most I could hope to do was delay this impending doomsday as much as possible, I just needed to come up with the right distant birthday to serve as my deadline, and mark it as the point when it would become acceptable to act like the sky is falling over still being without a girl.

 

I would draw a line in the sand on said birthday, and if I STILL didn’t have a first kiss, first cuddle, or first girlfriend by that day, it would indeed be a legitimate travesty, and I’d have carpe blanche to feel as miserable as I wanted. I wanted to choose a birthday so ridiculously far into the future that the mere notion of still not having a first kiss or cuddle by then would seem absolutely ludicrous, and would ensure I’d never have to worry about wanting to end my life on my birthday again. My first thought was to choose my 25th.

 

It seemed a lifetime away, and such an utterly preposterous choice that it seemed like a safe bet. It was so preposterous that I laughed when I thought of of it. But, then I thought of my Mom, and how I needed to absolutely guarantee, without a shadow of a doubt that she’d never have to see me that way again, and I decided to go even further, and make a sure thing even surer. I decided to make my deadline so hyperbolically far away that the only way I could possibly NOT get my first kiss or first cuddle by then was if I committed some heinous crime and got sent to maximum security prison for the rest of my life, and didn’t come into contact with a female for decades.

 

With Mama in mind, I chose to give myself until my 30th birthday. About to turn 19, I sat down, and I made a promise, a pact, a sworn solemn oath with myself that I would not let the word “suicide”, or anything related to it, even enter my subconscious for a second unless I one day find myself a 30 year old, practically a middle-aged man, and still have never kissed, cuddled, or dated a girl. I chose my 30th, but with the way it felt at the time it might as well have been my 60th. I took a good, long, deep breath. I felt a massive weight lifted from my shoulders,  and for the first time in my adult life the rain cloud above my head, constantly taunting me for being so far behind in life, completely dissipated. Enter, stage left: my 30th birthday.

 

 

Rock Bottom

It’s my 30th birthday, and there’s not a kiss or cuddle in sight. I was numb, but I spent the day doing the same thing I did every year and hung out with my parents, and my older sister and her family – just more than half of my immediate family, as my older brother and his family lived half the country away – as I tried to distract myself from the fact that I had achieved the impossible, and was now 30 years old, was still starkly alone, and was still without a kiss, a cuddle, or a girlfriend to my name. It was an event my mother put together each year, knowing I didn’t have any friends to do anything with, and for what it was it was actually really nice. Not kissing or cuddling, but nice, quality family time. I spent the majority of the day playing Xbox and Switch with my brother-in-law and my two teenage nephews he had with my sister, and later opened presents before we ordered pizza and everyone awkwardly sang me Happy Birthday.

 

After that we were treated to my mom’s famous desserts that I requested she make for the occasion, and continued to hang out into the evening, surrounded all the while by my mom’s two wiener dogs Ollie and Herbie, my Boston Terrier Pip I’d had since I was a teenager, our family cat Dickens that we got when my uncle passed away, and my sister’s mutt, Annie. The dogs and cats in my life have always been equally important to me as my blood relatives, and I would be lost without them. Sadly Pip was on the chubby side, and weighed far too much to meet the weight limit my apartment building required to have her come live with me when I moved into my apartment, so I got my cat Jack instead. I loved Jack as much as I loved anything in my life, but he was unsocialized with other animals, and tried to attack any animal that he came into contact with. This aggression tragically meant that he was unable to attend family get-togethers with the rest of our animals. Throughout the day I couldn’t help but keep wishing I was kissing or cuddling throughout the day rather than spending time with family, but I tried to remind myself just as often that this little get together was still much, much more than what almost every other human on the planet got on their birthdays.

 

As the sun began to set in the fall sky I thanked everyone one last time, gathered all of my presents together, and started heading back to my apartment. My parents lived in the same neighboring town as the department store I drove to regularly, and it was just a half-hour drive through what was largely farmland and country roads to get to either of them from my apartment, or vice versa. I genuinely enjoyed spending time with my family, but it wasn’t long into my drive home that the paper-thin distraction of their company faded, and I was hit with the debilitating depression I had been narrowly avoiding all day. A few years ago the presents alone would have been enough to distract me from my woes for a while, as I loved nothing more than obtaining material items, but this year I would not be so easily swayed. No, this was the year I broke the promise to myself I had made so many birthdays earlier, and there was nothing that could have stopped the anguish that was soon to come. I managed to reach the outskirts of my little town before I had to start holding back the tears, and not wanting to even bring suicide into the equation again, my mind was going a million miles an hour trying to think of something that might make this night hurt just a little less. As I passed by the local grocer just a few blocks from my apartment building, it came to me: maybe I could do the next best thing to trying to kill myself, and drown my sorrows.

 

Relieved I managed to surmise a way of saving myself from the hell that was waiting for me back at my one-bedroom, one-bath solitary confinement, I pulled into the entrance of the grocery store parking lot, parked hastily, and headed straight for the liquor section with a bevy of tears still pressing hard against my eyes. Grey Goose, Hennessy, Bacardi Dark, and Patron: I’d obviously been listening to far too much gangster rap, because these were what I grabbed from the shelves without a second thought. Wanting kisses, wanting cuddles, wanting a girlfriend, wanting attention, wanting love, wanting companionship, wanting meaning to my existence: For once in my life, I wanted to stop wanting things and simply wallow in my woe and self-pity for a good, long while. 

 

I wanted to completely clear my conscious, lay back, and be consumed by my soul-sucking solitary. Truth be told, I swore off the devil’s hooch a long time ago, and by that night I’d been bone dry since my days of living in the university dorms about eight years prior. But this night was a special kind of wretched, and I figured if there was ever a good reason for re-awakening my long-dormant demons, this was it. I checked out, drove home, and headed to my apartment on the second floor with paper bags in hand, but at this point everything was starting to blur together, as I finally let go and allowed the tears to begin trickling down my cheeks. I rushed to my front door, barged in, and managed to give Jack some soft food before taking the bagged bottles to my living room and collapsing on the couch. 

 

So, I drank. I drank, and I thought of Piper. I drank, and I thought of the countless other girls I’ve singled out and made the object of my affection over the years, and similarly failed at making mine. I drank, and I thought of my parents, my sister, and my brother: each of them had found their soul mate and true love by an age much younger than mine. I drank, and I thought of all the long nights I spent alone, lying in my bed throughout my young adulthood. About how, in an existence plagued by heartless pretty girls, bullies, germs, and not enough money to buy all the material things I wanted, I would lay in bed with my arms wrapped around my chubby Boston Terrier Pip, squeezing her tight, and praying one day soon I’d have the chance to engage in something similar with a human female. I drank, and I thought back to one of my neighbor’s graduation parties I went to when I was 18, where one of my brother’s many beautiful friends let me have a drink of her beer. It was my first time tasting beer, but I didn’t give that a second thought because I was so focused on the fact that my lips had just pressed against the same bit of aluminum hers did not minutes before. Not only that, but some beer that might have splashed in and around her mouth as she took a drink had now splashed in and around mine. I felt elated, aroused, and almost euphoric at the prospect as I handed the can back to her, walked away, and put my fingers to my lips, giggling at the notion I’d just gotten the closest I’d ever been to my fabled first kiss.

 

I drank, and I thought about the time I was still but a naive freshman. Green as can be and about as confident as I ever was, during a school dance a cute junior asked me to slow dance with her. I was utterly intoxicated with the new experience, and after the dance I asked her to go with me to a movie the following week, to which she enthusiastically agreed. I got there early and ready for an experience that would do nothing short of change my life, but after waiting in the theater lobby for hours, she never did show. I drank, and I thought of my two different trips to the inpatient psych ward, and the girls I met there. I thought about what it was like to spend days living in close proximity with a group of what started out as strangers, and how we’d spend every moment of every day together, playing games, eating, talking openly, and learning everything there was to know about each other.  After a few days we got so close I felt like I’d take a bullet for any of them, and by the time I had to go home there wasn’t a secret between any of us. During that time I’ve felt closer to the people I met there than I have with almost anyone, and I started to ponder, as I often did, about what it might be like to have that sort of rapport in a relationship with a woman. I couldn’t even fathom it. I drank, and I thought of the girl I genuinely thought I fell in love with during my first trip there, and how I found out on my last day that she was a lesbian. I drank, and I thought about how she added me on Facebook when we both got back to our normal lives, albeit many miles apart. I thought about how over the years I tried so many times to contact her and tell her my feelings for her as I hoped to God that she was just a little straight, and how she called me a stalker the last time we spoke, told me never to talk to her again, and then blocked me.

 

At this point the tears had subsided, and I continued to drink because I was just as much of a coward as I always had been, and I was still too scared to do anything to try to better my situation. I proceeded to get completely tilted that night, and as my inhibitions dropped with each swig, so too did my incessant self-loathing. I wanted a woman. I wanted a woman more that I’d ever wanted anything in my life, and to tell you the truth, if it was legal in my state I’d have seriously considered giving it all up and calling a lady of the night, having her over, and letting her have her way with me. I laid down onto the floor, and pulled out my phone as the tears started to flow again. Piper was far out of reach now, but I couldn’t shake the memory of her. In one of my final moments of lucidity, and with a great deal of help from a sizable helping of the liquid courage I’d just consumed, I grabbed my phone, brought up Facebook Messenger, and I slid right into Piper’s DMs proper.

 

 

Revival

I woke up around noon the next day with a sore back and killer headache, lying on the floor with my phone and a half a bottle of booze beside me. I slowly got to my feet and tried to gather my thoughts as I hobbled into the kitchen for some Advil. I choked down two blue tablets, hungover and with no recollection of sending a message to anyone. The whole night before was still a bit of hazy, and I only noticed the IM in my sent messages when I got on to check out a link to a funny cat video my mom had sent me. When I saw her name in my recent conversations on Facebook Messenger, my heart skipped a few beats and I forgot all about my migraine. I took a deep breath, opened the chat window, and began reading, as petrified as I was curious to see what type of memorandum I sent the most attractive girl I’d ever known; drunk, at the end of my rope, and completely free of all inhibitors, paranoias, and self doubt.

 

In so many words I told her that I liked her, and that I’ve always liked her. I said I always wanted to tell her about my feelings for her, but always got too scared of what might happen if I did. I told her she was the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my life, and professed that now that I didn’t work with her and never see her anymore I regretted never telling her of my affections when I had the chance. I apologized in advance for for asking her through a Facebook message, but said if it’s not too late I wanted to know if she’d like to go to dinner and a movie with me sometime. I finished by thanking her for being so welcoming and gracious to me every time I saw her, and said that seeing her at work was the best part of my week. Having finally said my piece, I finished the admission of my forbidden adoration with a hug emoji. Seeing I sent that emoji is when I knew I must have been really toasted, as at the time I almost never used emojis for any occasion. Simple, largely free of any romanticizing or embellishment, and with only a few drunken typos; the message was to-the-point and nothing but straight truth. I couldn’t decide if I was more relieved or terrified for finally putting my infatuation with Piper into words for her, but either way I couldn’t help but feel proud of myself for doing so. The chat bubble was still absent the little “Read” indicator that pops up below it to confirm the receiver had both officially received and read the message, and so began one of the most arduous dilemmas of my life: Do I delete the message before she can see it, save face as best I could before she gets creeped out, or do I grab life by the danglers for once in my cowardly existence, go for it, and let the message stand, consequences be damned?

 

All my cards were on the table, and I was all-in. I tensely contemplated the decision until I gradually drifted back into a hungover slumber on the couch. I woke up again later that evening, and this time had regained all my faculties – meaning that all my irrational, petty fears were back as well. I was scared she’d think I was a creepy stalker, I was scared she’d never want to see or talk to me again, I was scared she’d get all her old co-workers at work to hate me. With the whole day off and nothing to do but grind my gears about things that may or may not happen, I spent the rest of the day pacing around with my phone in hand, staring at my message to Piper, and anxiously waiting for it to get marked as “Read” while going back and forth on the decision of whether or not I should delete the message. If I wasn’t second guessing my word choice, I began to fixate on the hug emoji I used, and how much it made me come off like a serial killer. I contemplated both deleting the message altogether, or deleting it and sending a similar one, but watered down to be less creepy, and without the blasted Jeffery Dahmer-esque use of the hug emoji. I remained indecisive, and must have changed my mind about a thousand times by the time the sun went down, but by some miracle I never did give in to my demons and delete the message by the time I passed out for the night.

 

My message was bold by any stretch of the imagination, but at the end of the day I don’t think the reason I actually sent it had anything to do with trying to get a girl to go on a date with me. Rather, on a night when I was confronting my own mortality, I think I sent the message simply to prove to myself that I could. Like a basketball player that goes for the ‘Hail Mary’ buzzer beater shot from way downtown with one second left on the clock in a tied championship game, I needed to be able to say I tried – regardless of the odds. Not only that, it was a grand gesture meant to be my one last hurrah of an attempt at a social life before I consumed half my bodyweight in liquor, a final grandiose all-or-nothing shot at getting what I’d always dreamt of. I needed something, anything to show for myself on my 30th birthday. Even if I couldn’t manage a kiss or a cuddle, at the very least I needed to be able to say I sent one lone, desperate Facebook message to the girl of my dreams by the time my deadline had passed.

 

Hungover, alone, and 30 years old; I woke up the next morning to a notification that the proverbial “Read” indicator had been signaled, instantly sending an intense rush of all kinds of mixed emotions tingling down my spine. Read, but still not responded to. I was unable to get too worked up, however, as I was scheduled to work. As I got ready and set off for the store, it was then time to wait and see if she would respond with a message of her own, ignore me, or just flat-out block me. Once again I began to wait, and after punching in I couldn’t focus on anything but the possibility of a reply from Piper. I helped customers and checked them out like usual, but my mind was focused entirely on my pocket, waiting for my phone to vibrate. My mind bounced off the walls for a couple hours at the possibilities of what she might say to my message until I finally felt the telltale vibration in my pants that I’d been waiting for. I told my manager I wanted to take my 15 minute break, and hustled to the break room at the back of the store. It was a long walk, and it took all the strength I had not to whip out my iPhone and see what she had to say right then and there in the middle of the sales floor. I rushed into the break room, frantically washed my filthy money-handling hands, sat down, took a deep breath, and clamored for the phone inside my pocket. I read her reply in utter disbelief:

 

“hey, np!!  i always thought you were kinda cute too. sure! wanna go next weekend?”

 

“…you were kinda cute…”. Jesus in heaven, my world was rattled, and everything I thought I knew was wrong. I don’t even remember the rest of my shift after that, and before I knew it I was back at my apartment once more and free to react appropriately. To say Piper’s response took me by surprise would be an understatement of astronomical proportions. I was just hoping if she responded that, at best, she might let me down gently without also tearing me a new one, but this was a response I’d never even considered in the realm of possibility. I was downright flabbergasted. So profoundly bamboozled, in fact, that just accepting her message as reality was a four-step process.

 

The Four Steps To Accepting Piper’s Response as a Reality

• • Step 1: Denial

My initial reaction to Piper’s message was to refute its legitimacy altogether. I read it. I read it again. I read it at least seventy-three more times, and every time it APPEARED to be her acceptance of my drunken solicitation in kind. But I refused to believe the message was what it seemed to be on the surface, not from a girl like her to a guy like me. It simply didn’t happen. I thought, maybe she didn’t actually write it. Maybe her account was hacked. Maybe she was being sarcastic and I was misinterpreting it. Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe there was a glitch in the matrix.

When I couldn’t find an obvious tell in the words she used, I started to critically analyze her choice of emojis.  It just didn’t add up. There HAD to be something I was missing that exposed the fraudulent instant message for the bunk it was. To spend your entire adolescent and adult life wanting something more than anything in the world, something you’d do anything to get, something you’ve dreamt about for decades, something you wanted more than money, power, or immortality, and something you’ve tried to kill yourself just because you didn’t have… and then to one day suddenly be handed that thing on a silver platter, all because I did something as trivial and basic as send a Facebook message… it was hard to fathom, to say the least. But, in time I came to see the message for what it really was: my long-overdue salvation. My carpe diem. My time had finally come, and I realized at once that I needed to both respect and appreciate whatever else was to come with this sudden fortune, and no matter what happened I must never forget those decades of desolation, or what it felt like to be completely alone.

 

• • Step 2: Euphoria

After coming to terms with the validity of Piper’s message, there was nothing left for me to do but revel in my newfound social prosperity. It felt like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone. I closed my eyes and was quickly overcome with an inherently delightful sense of felicity I had never quite felt before. Like someone who was color blind that had suddenly regained their trichromacy, it felt like I was only just starting to really see the world in all its prismatic vibrancy. With that one brief message, it felt like Piper had effectively restored my faith in the human race, cured cancer, taken all types of elephants off the endangered species list, and gave me a million dollars in one fell swoop.

It was validation. It was immense relief. It was a reignited fervor to live. It was euphoria, nirvana, and pure bliss combined. The date hadn’t even happened yet, but I managed to find all this in the mere confirmation that a girl wanted to spend time with me. The weight of everything Piper’s message meant hit me like a brick wall at 75 miles an hour, and incapable of any other response I began to cry tears of joy. I laid on the floor, and all at once completely unraveled. I sprawled out across my living room carpet, and unable to remember the last time I felt such unbridled elation, I let the tears flow and cried harder than the first time I watched Never Let Me Go (2010) until I was taken by a most content sleep. I’d never felt so good, but when I woke up there was a devil on my shoulder hellbent on changing that. He leaned in, and whispered into my ear, “All this time, and all you had to do to seize all you ever wanted in life was send one Facebook message…” “Jesus,” I thought, “the little bugger speaks the truth.” And with that untimely revelation, the next phase took over.

 

• • Step 3: Regret

One message. One drunk message. One drunk bloody Facebook message. For nearly two decades, everything I wanted in life could have been mine, if only I didn’t wait until I was at absolute rock bottom to send a dang Facebook message to a girl. The two-thirds of my life… All those long days and cold nights, and the excruciatingly hollow solitude they held… The relentless, gut-wrenching heartache of never knowing if I’d ever even have someone in this life… and it all could have been gone like *that.* There was no pill harder I’d ever had to swallow. I’d said some horrible things to my father, I’d paused the television on some naughty parts of Game of Thrones (2011-19), but I’d never messed up like this before. I became livid, as any man would with the realization they wasted the majority of my life alone, entirely because they were too cowardly to send a Facebook message. Livid with myself, my initial thought was for retribution. I wanted to hurt myself, punish myself for this unforgivable discretion. I’d been down that road before, however, and I snuffed that notion out as quickly as I thought it. Instead, I sat down on my floor again, and with some deep breathing I managed to subside my temper. I hung my head, and began to cry tears of woe. I laid face-down onto the floor, and let myself drown in the tears, snot, regret, and self pity until everything went numb and I fell asleep once more.

 

• • Step 4: Acceptance

I woke up the next morning with a calming sense of serenity, and felt an absolute clarity about everything I had been struggling with. The reply Piper sent me was neither the best thing in the world, nor the worst. Rather, it was simply what I made of it. Would I continue to play the role of the coward and let her message fade away with time because it’s so scary to talk to girls in real life, or would I take charge, take her on the best dang date of her life, and make her fall madly in love with me? The answer couldn’t be clearer, and after coming to accept Piper’s message as a reality at last, I knew I needed to think of the perfect movie for us to watch, and the best place to eat. I steeled myself, and went ahead with the planning.

 

 

Nachos & Nazis

After coming to accept the reality of her reply, I was ready to come back with a vengeance and steal Piper’s heart. Just as I began writing a message back, however, I realized there were still two massive unknowns: what movie we were going to see, and where we were going to eat after. My first instinct was to determine these things the democratic way, but just as I went to ask for Piper’s input I remembered what I had learned in my two decades of experience with countless ghosting encounters, close calls, teases, plans falling through, as well as what I’d observed from others: No matter how unfair it may be, there’s definitely truth behind the old unspoken rule that the guys have to be the one to initiate everything. Not only that, but if the guy’s got a chance to take charge with a girl, you bet your sweet bippy the girl probably wants him take charge. It’s the biggest, most backward B.S. I’ve ever known, and a hard truth I’d been at odds with my entire life, but that’s just how it is with most girls. With this in mind, I knew it’d be a much better idea to propose a specific movie and restaurant rather than leave it open-ended. I looked up what was playing at the time, and and began to peruse the options for what I wanted to watch while I popped my first date cherry:

 

• “Parasite (2019)”: This film was already getting a lot of Oscar buzz around this time, but I just couldn’t imagine having to try to enjoy my time with Piper and read subtitles at the same time.

• “Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)”: The first Zombieland was action-packed and made me laugh out loud numerous times, but she might not have even seen the first one, and I wanted my first date movie to have more heart and emotion than gags.

• “Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)”: All I knew about this one at the time was that Mackenzie Davis was playing a new model of a terminator in it, and we all know what terminators wear when they first arrive someplace, or should I say what they don’t wear… And while I would have killed to see what that spectacle of a woman’s buns looked like for the first time, I knew this was neither the time nor the place.

• “Jojo Rabbit (2019)”: It was almost entirely in english, and appeared to have heart, emotion, and a decent amount of humor as well. Also, no buns, and I’d already developed a taste for Nazi satire ever since the first time I watched Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane produce the musical “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers (2005) as a child, so I figured I fit right in with Jojo’s target audience.

And with that, it was clear: Jojo Rabbit is what we would watch… But what would we eat? That decision was much more straightforward, as I just went with what was convenient: Our local Taco Bell was the only place that would both be open that time at night, and was within walking distance from the theater. I was fairly certain she wasn’t a vegan, and I just hoped she wasn’t expecting five-star cuisine on our first rendezvous. I agreed that the upcoming weekend would work perfect, as it was practically as soon as possible, and it wasn’t supposed to snow too hard. With all the decisions made and everything set in place, I opened Facebook Messenger, and began to reply to Piper at long last.