Strategy for the Honest

Rules. Whose? Why not mine? The rules I can’t follow are rules I have to change, fit to me. It won’t work the other way round. Confidence makes the rules mine to make, mine to play. Fun. Whatever I get having fun is worth having. Only my rules know me. Why inexpertly interpret someone else’s handbook? For how much longer do I misapply someone else’s tricks? Haven’t I always eschewed tricks? Don’t fake it to make it; just make it! Tricks are fake, failed adaptations. As a diet is to eating. Know yourself and your needs, and you can trust your imagination to get them: Strategy for the honest.

Back Into My Hair Shirt

Self-created penance—guilt: Is it all that’s in the way? The plunge is a scary thing, but if I get too comfortable alone—well, I can’t imagine that. And that’s the problem: I enjoy my time at home, but staying there is too easy, and my life is not wholly contained in my apartment. What portion’s on the outside? More every day. What it looks like, I haven’t the foggiest. I thought I would feel differently, but desperation and impatience, even together, can’t calm the fear of actually going on a date. When do I say “I don’t have a car?” When does it become dishonest not to? When you know it’s a dealbreaker and could thin the herd to you by saying it. Just another excuse to fall back on Herself and into my hair shirt.

Too Much Hope

Who my age can I possibly impress? and how? We’ve all been through the relationship wringer. We all have our laundry lists. We’ve heard the lines, seen the tricks. There’s nothing left but being yourself or giving up. I never had a line, never had a trick. My success, though meager, was, at least relatively, honest. Hardly the success I needed, though. Now, I’m tired of anything but honesty, which is hard to find, hard to deliver. I see the guards people put up, recognize many as my own, and I let them have them. What is it worth to try to penetrate where you’ve been sternly told not to go? Nothing, I’ve found out. And the jungle gets thicker as you behave and wait for the invitation that will never come. Who ventures from their own jungle? Who machetes a clear path from their heart to another? Who’s to trust with such a clear guide? By now we know what we don’t want, but what does that leave us? We exclude the faults, one by one, until we’ve distilled the perfect, and perfectly unattainable, person. And there you are: Alone as it gets. Perfection isn’t a goal, it’s a death sentence, a resignation to fantasy as the best reality you can muster. Go ahead–you live that. I still have too much hope.