Today is the first sunny day in London for what feels like a millenium and still I have found myself devoting this tragic sunday to taking the crater in my sofa another inch deeper. Anyone who has ever ingested adderrall knows that you have to be doing what you intend to do for the next four hours the moment the medication kicks in, or else you'll find yourself buffing the kitchen floor with a sonicare toothbrush, color and shape coordinating your closet, and plucking your leg hair from ankle to bikini line incapable of stopping until either you've got them all or the adderall wears off. A similar phenomenon occurs when I write. Not even the prospect of a ball of fire to melt my frigid heart and warm my face could unglue me from the keyboard in those moments I start to marry thoughts to the page. I suppose I like it because i can disguise myself as having done something when the reality is having been unwashed and bedbound until 5pm.
Have you ever seen those $20.00 pop up tents? They are marketed toward amateurs (in life, not just camping) for taking only two minutes to pitch, but what they fail to mention is that they also take a lifetime to pack away. There's a metaphor to my love life there where the first time I really fell in love it took about 2 minutes and seemed like the most incredible, easy thing ever, and then from the time it was over has felt like an immoveable feat. AND THEN just when you think you've gotten the last corner into the box, BANG that little shit pops up again to startle you and you have to begin again.
In the process of trying to find novel ways to destroy that unnatural, nylon jack-in-the-box style habitat , getting a text like this when you're a single person living in London is really the best thing that can happen to you in terms of romance:
Seems like a paradox in a city with 9 million people, a significant proportion of whom are highly educated, successful, beautiful, cultured, and interesting. But it's equivalently easy to be anonymous in a city so large and furthermore British people are not exactly romantic. I guess this is what happens when you get older. My love life went from being beautiful and unadulterated by baggage to terrifying and sad and also really fucking weird with loads of allegorical suitcases of every shape and size (albeit Prada branded). The last date I went on in London was with a guy who would have apparently ticked a lot of boxes, but who in the first ten minutes lamented being accused of homophobia at work (where there's smoke there's fire people), then ordering an orange juice at DINNER at an italian restaurant, then asking the waiter if there were any chips on the menu (again, this was an italian restaurant), then gulping the entire orange juice instead of actually chewing his food before ordering a SECOND orange juice to wash down the rest of his meal. He even tried to intellectualize this by saying "I don't understand why people drink wine with their food, it doesn't help you get the food down". Dates like this render me almost hopeless when it comes to matters of the heart and commission me instead to the sofa in my robe on consequential saturday nights, massaging my roommate's feet and eating bowls of cereal for dinner while I reflect on the fact that the most productive thing I did over the weekend was charge my vibrator.
So who is going to scoop my body off the ice when I eat shit at the Somerset House rink this Christmas? The answer is nobody. I will be sexless in the city which is still better than another handbag or a third glass of orange juice.
