I blocked him on Facebook and unfollowed his Twitter, because the one thing I’m good at is never deluding myself that I can handle the out-of-context social media posts of someone I used to have sex with. I am not calloused in the way you need to be to gracefully handle the onslaught of confusing and hurtful images posted online by an ex. And I’m not even talking about, “Wow look at my new girlfriend our luv is 4eva!” I mean HOW COULD YOU CHECK IN AT OLIVE GARDEN WITHOUT ME, YOU SAVAGE? So he had to go. I don’t know how to use apps to hide people’s relationship status updates or whatever the fuck, so I wiped my Internet slate clean of him and avoided people who would ask me when I was going to get back on fucking Match.com.
In the post-Fred era of my life, here’s what I would tell myself on your average Tuesday night while absentmindedly massaging some random corporeal swelling with sick-smelling medicated gel: YOU CAN JUST WAIT, YOU DUMMY. STOP TRYING TO BE HAPPY NOW, YOU CAN JUST WAIT. That I could and/or would just wait for everyone else to get old, too, that I would just smile and nod supportively while my young, healthy peers ran through exhaustive lists of their carefree romantic encounters, pretending to listen with intention, patiently waiting for the joints in their knees to erode and the discs in their backs to slip out of place so that they’d stop asking me why I didn’t “put myself out there more” and maybe start to understand firsthand what it feels like to pursue someone romantically when you are thirtysomething and have a physical disability and your target is also thirtysomething and does not. HOW CAN I SWIPE LEFT ON TINDER WHEN MY GNARLED AND CRIPPLED FINGERS CAN’T EVEN WORK THAT WAY WITHOUT A COUPLE CELEBREX?
My joints are kind of a mess. There is arthritis in the metatarsal joints on the tops of my feet and in my knee joints and my hand joints, and I have nerve palsy and vitamin deficiency in my sciatic nerve. (I think? Sometimes when the doctor is rattling off a list of things it all runs together.) This makes my feet tingly, and when I stand up from sitting sometimes it takes a few seconds (read: an eternity in real life when people with normal legs are already hovering awkwardly near the restaurant entrance because they had no idea that it was going to take me so long, pawing awkwardly at the ground waiting to regain the use of my foot) before I can step down on my left leg, and you should’ve been bored with this twenty words ago. I walk like a marionette most of the time, which, despite being kind of hilarious, is the absolute worst; because I am a human being and doing in a real world where people grimace behind their windshields and look at you funny if you take too long to uncertainly step down from a high curb when it’s snowing. Hobbling clumsily around limbs akimbo is double the worst, because none of the real boys ever wants to take Pinocchio out for a glass of wine and a decent piece of meat, and what is my life if it isn’t filled with breathless, passionate courtships?
I decided to wade back out into the choppy dating waters of the Internet a few weeks after Fred and I ended things, because I am not a person for whom meet-cutes naturally occur. I don’t have a dog to walk through a park of available single humans, no hip Laundromat in which to conveniently forget my dryer sheets so I can ask a handsome stranger for one of his. My dating profile was pretty perfect, I thought. My friend Jill says that I joke too much, that people are scared off by someone who tries to make herself seem so clever, but I swear to God that’s how I really think and not just some Internet shtick. I just can’t do the requisite “I love baby animals!” and feigned interest in “trying out new cuisine!” and pretending to “live every day to its fullest!” which doesn’t really even mean anything anyway. Why do people say that? What impression are they hoping to make? I watch TV all day and leave the house only for snacks: THIS IS THE FULLNESS THAT I AM LIVING. The last book I’d read at the time was Gods Without Men and that seemed really impressive to me, especially since I had to haul that doorstop pretentiously around on the train for a week while I finished it. Couple a handful of boring half-truths with half a dozen real pictures of my real body: weighty boobs and meaty backside and the outline of a belly in this one where I’m leaning over to blow out birthday candles on a neon-blue cake. No flattering Instagram filtration, no angled duckface surrounded by a group of my most attractive and nubile friends. The last thing I ever want to do is show up to a bar to meet a person who is expecting to meet the quarter of my sweating meatbeard I didn’t crop out of the one photo I wasn’t too embarrassed to post. BECAUSE POTENTIAL DATES WILL DRAG ME IN FRONT OF THE FIRING SQUAD, YES? I had read many a snarky think piece centered on blind dates derailed by the super mean lying liarface who’d broken some naive young man’s heart by having the sheer audacity to arrive at the predetermined meeting place fatter than she’d advertised. I wasn’t gonna be that lady.