“Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from other people in your life… It’s all any of us want. And it’s hell when we get there.” —The Priest from Fleabag, apparently.
I say apparently, reader, because I haven’t seen the show. But I have—on (now) multiple occasions—been told I would not only love it, but that I also remind people (mostly men I’ve dated) of the main character. Which is a funny thing to hear, isn’t it? That you remind someone of a fictional woman on a TV show. What could I and this person—who doesn’t technically exist outside a script and some very strategic eye contact—possibly have in common?
So I asked ChatGPT: “How would you describe the woman from Fleabag?”
And ChatGPT responded: “Grieving and guilt-ridden. Hungry for intimacy, terrified of vulnerability. Performative and self-aware. Sharp, witty, addicted to distraction. Sexually expressive, emotionally guarded. Spiritually curious, existentially wrecked. In short: she’s not just a ‘messy woman.’ She’s a portrait of what it means to survive while grieving, attach while afraid, and joke while drowning.”
…well, fucking fuck me.
Date: April 30th
Weight: I don’t know or care
Age: 33 as fuck
Dear reader,
Have you ever wondered if you were losing your mind? Not in the cute, sitcom-y, Jess-from-New Girl kind of way. I mean in a Harley Quinn, is-she-clinically-psychotic-or-a-drug-addict-or-maybe-an-online-e-gamer-girl kind of way. In other words: are her brains like scrambled eggs.
If so—well, we have something in common. And I have more questions for you later.
But if not, my guess is you haven’t yet experienced a true loss in your family. And reader—I hope that’s true. (And I hope Elon Musk puts his next billion dollars toward a Tuck Everlasting Bryan Johnson-type potion so we can all live together forever, or at the very least, die at the exact same time as everyone we love.) (Okay yeah, I like the second option more.)
But for those of you who have felt like you were losing your mind—and who have also experienced a tremendously painful loss in your life, dead or alive—let me ask you this: Did it feel a little like déjà vu?
Like it was a place you’d been before?
A feeling you’d already survived?
A nightmare you thought you’d woken up from, only to find yourself back inside it again?
Me too.
In the month of March.
So, in the spirit of vulnerability, I’ll hit you with my big T truth: I am deathly afraid of the day my dad dies.
But more than that—I am deathly afraid of being single on the day he does.
I can’t explain why I feel this way. It’s just that, having already lost one of the two men in my immediate family, and having spent the better part of 33 years feeling like my dad was (is) my best friend, I… cannot tell you how terrifying it was (is) to think about the imminent day of death that’s awaiting him (and everyone else over the age of 65). And like I said—this is déjà vu, reader—because I’ve been here before.
I lost one of my best friends who was a man before—my brother. And I’ll tell you: when I lost my brother, at the ripe age of 24, I immediately (immediately, reader) wanted a child. Wanted five children. Wanted seventeen. I remember walking around my neighborhood with my first boyfriend, telling him I wanted a baby.
“Slow down,” he said. “You won’t solve this with a baby.”
That’s what you think. But I’d be willing to bet a third of children born in America were conceived out of the deep, impenetrable fear of loss. Out of the kind of grief that makes you want to build something—anything—just to prove you’re still here.
What screams I need to build more than the feeling of crumbling?
Anyway, all this to say—the thing that happened when my dad didn’t die in February is—I realized he will. Eventually. Probably sooner than later. And that on the day he does die, god damn it, I want to be ready. Wrapped and ready in the loving arms of a man.
Is that healthy? No.
But is it human? I think so.
Otherwise, Fleabag was right again, apparently:
“Either everyone feels like this a little bit and they’re just not talking about it, or I am completely fucking alone. Which isn’t fucking funny.”
So—how, reader, does one go about the whole finding-a-husband and falling-in-love thing?
Well, it turns out I can tell you. Because somewhere between the anticipatory grief, the return to hysterical bonding, and the manic dating app swiping… I met him.
Him.
My husband.
My third—but undeniably best—husband.
(In the most unexpected way possible.)
To be continued.
wow <3 we are so back
Your best work yet my friend.