I Am Really Single
By Haley Blazer
I am really single. As in really, really single. The type of single that lands me wearing fuzzy snowflake pajama pants at four thirty in the afternoon in May. The type of single that eats half a block of Trader Joe’s cheese for lunch. Yesterday I snuck enough of my mom’s boxed white wine to get tipsy and spin around my room trying to write a song on the guitar that I do not know how to play. I can tell I’m single because I am staring into the purple glitter lamp on my perfectly tidied desk-top watching the glitter swirl. For entertainment. I can tell I’m really single because pop sickles, leg stubble, and the baseball hat I keep wearing out in the yard.
Actually, I could make food and singledom its own separate category. I drive myself out to get ice cream in the middle of the afternoon. I consider baking a fancy chocolate cake just because. Also because then I could eat it. My trips to the pantry are frequent, and they are the only times I leave my room because today it was raining.
When it isn’t raining, I blast Lana Del Rey in the Car, or the B-52’s, just to be funny, but also because I kind of like them now. I listen to more of the B-52’s than any other person can probably tolerate, meaning anything more than “Love Shack” when it gets played by a shitty DJ at your cousin’s wedding.
My room is really, really clean — because I am really, really single. It’s almost like my own personal, spinster-in-training resort. The floor is freshly vacuumed. There is a “Fresh Cut Roses” candle burning. A really fancy Yankee candle that I think cost eighteen dollars and smells like old ladies in the very best way. Everything is so fresh! I caught up on my ticket-stub scrap-book today! And also organized my box of embroidery floss. And also devoted a couple hours to the perfection of Serge Gainsbourg’s discography—the very source of all the French Jazz I’ve been listening to lately! Things are great; I am still wearing yesterday’s then-superfluous eyeliner.
I am reading too. Getting though pages and pages of novels I stumble upon by chance. If only I stumbled upon pages and pages of available, handsome men. I would take the swap, I think.
There is one level of being single that is normal—healthy even. But am I still there? Have I forgotten how to hold a casual conversation with the opposite sex? Have I unknowingly blurred the line between quirky-alluring and crazy-off-putting girl one too many times? Have I carried my laptop with me to the toilet? I have the answer to that one—it’s yes, yes, in fact, I have. You’d better believe it.
Check back in another month, another three months, Christ, another year even. I might very well be in the very same place I am in now. Literally, I could be sitting in my room at my parent’s house, counting down the days till my twenty first birthday in utter, placid boredom because I didn’t get any of the internships I applied for. What does the future hold? Maybe it’s better if I don’t know for certain.
Singledom—it’s hard to shake off. While my chances of meeting someone in my room hover around negative ten percent, the solution seems obvious. Get out. Leave. Go, like, anywhere. But for some deeply-buried and probably profound reason, I do not go. I stay. I stay right here, really, really single. It kind of blows, but somehow I’m not actually mad about it. Okay, that might be a complete lie that I’m trying to feed myself between the handfuls of chocolate chips, but what if it weren’t a lie? Maybe soon I will be single enough to forget about men entirely. Maybe one day my breasts will fall off and I will walk around like a regular asexual soul. I’m not sure if that’s how that works, but maybe. I dwell in possibility.