BOY-DELLO!!

In my life men seem to be perpetually relegated to the status of "them" in the cosmic "them" and "us". It's as though my senses, through evolution, have been finely tuned to only seeing a few out of the masses of them, the same way my cat automatically, almost despite himself, chases after objects that are of a particular shape and speed. Their are only a few who break through the hazy field of "them", and to me those few are like a drug, like incense, they seem to be more than mortal, they are pure and enormous and powerful. Those are the few(the brave, the proud) who do not belong to either world of "them" or of "us."

I'm thirty years old and I've been doing this mating dance for almost half my life and you would think that men would start to make more sense to me, that they'd begin to seem less like aliens, but instead the opposite has happened. I am more confused by them now than I have ever been. They walk among us but they are not like us. It's little wonder with this kind of attitude it's hard for me to get dates..

When I was younger, boys held out the promise of so much love and fullfillment and excitement and adventure, but then my heart got broken, and it got broken again, and I cried and felt like a zombie for a week or a month or a year. I got optimistic again and got all into some guy and then got my heart broken again. and now I have this thrist for a boyfriend again. But I know it means that crying is going to have to come again and the fear and the stifling feeling of losing myself and feeling like a fool for loving the alien. I'm thirty and I'm just exhausted by it. after a while something happens to us, something changes, something just gives up..

And like a riot grrl or a girl who got her favorite toy taken away I want to put on combat boots and have a screaming, thrashing temper tantrum about all this disappointment and all this anger and sadness. I want to lash out at something, but there really is nothing to hit against, my fury is muffled by a soft, cushiony "acceptance", an attempt to grow older gracefully, without malice or hatred, because there are so many of them I'm angry with that to just start thinking of it makes me exhausted. But mostly my fury is tempered by my fear which seems to have made a more comfortable and permanant place for itself inside of me over the years.

I'm pissed off because this was all supposed to be so much fun. Being single and frolicking on the beach and drinking sunkist or having quick dark sex and walking home at dawn with your hair smelling of a stranger's semen, not having to be worried about being "tied down" by a husband or a kid. Boys would be there, romance would be there, it was all a given. After all, single people have more freedom and more sex and more romance, right?

Well, maybe boys do. All I know is that my girl friends and I gather together on a regular basis to mourn or laugh over the latest romantic fiasco or lack of one, while we get older, our biological clocks ticking, worrying about how we're ever gonna get the boy thing right in time to have a baby. and were getting more pessimsitic by the day. Suddenly we see out lives as a mysterious black hole, because we may not end up being part of a family portrait like we'd always expected, and may instead be hanging out and dating and eating doritos and worrying about our rent until we're ninety.

The loneliest thing about this is feeling like I'm the only one to be going through it, that all the rest of us did end up with the lives we were raised to believe we'd have. That there's something wrong with me for not being there. We are strong, independent, smart, thinking , laughing females and we'll always need to have our friends around to go out and play with.