Easy Come, Easy Ghost
Sometimes, all's well that ends.
There is no longer any need to fear The End™ in the year of our Lorde, 2022. A silly little lad who loves berries and cream once said, all’s well that ends well. The End always threatens to come in different ways, and has yet to make good on it (for those of us reading, anyhow). Whoever’s left has successfully called its bluff.
The fact that we (humanity) are at peak unwell should indicate that things are not ending well. In fact, all too often, they are not ending at all! They buffer in uncertainty, inventing new catchy names for all the ways we casually cause one another pain in the meanwhile. I don’t believe in naming things I don’t intend to keep.
There are a handful of government names in my contacts that have yet to answer such simple questions as “How are you?” and “Is your dog OK?” And as I’m blessed with the short-term memory of a fruit fly, the names drift further and further down in my messages to the point that I honestly forget who they are by the time I have to scroll for them (or when they pop back up to say something unnecessary after so much time has passed that I have to reread the above transcript because I’ve genuinely forgotten).
Whenever someone is heavy-handed in the chat before meeting, romantic or not, the odds are 50/50 that they’re full of shit (60/40 if they’re from out of town). Texting your way to love is a gamble but if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that sometimes it is just that — texting. Messaging is a lot easier than loving, after all.
Release from the rigors of conventional courtship means that no one knows how to do romance with the traditional materials on hand, so we go through the motions and hope that something, anything at all, will manifest. We come up with love languages and attachment theories to organize our interpersonal relations, and sometimes it helps but mostly it doesn’t. I’d rather not give anyone the cheat sheet to emotionally manipulate me, as much as I’d very much prefer not to wear a scarlet letter A for Anxious around my neck. (I’m in recovery, thanks very much.)
This may simply be symptomatic of the kind of disjointed dating practice we all halfway participate in today. We have no tolerance for friction — operational or relational. It’s a byproduct of the culture we’ve created for ourselves, one devoid of discomfort and prioritizing convenience at all costs. As we develop new anxieties in response to the gaping freedom of living life for oneself, no wonder everybody’s so spooked. As much as love is emotionally and spiritually fulfilling, it also happens to be a deeply inconvenient emotion by nature. So.
Two things you should know about a person before committing any emotional organ: how they behave when they get what they want, and how they behave when they don’t. Not everyone is ready for the things they want. (And some of them don’t even believe they’re deserving of them, to begin with.) We’ve all got a talent for taking these things for granted, and we’ve all been underestimated by someone else’s willful smokescreen of indifference. I’m sure there’s something to do with gratitude here, but I’m not one to be telling anyone which way to look at a gift horse. No one dies from love but sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you want to die.
I have a lazy fantasy of trading all my existential anxieties in for the affection and keep of another. It almost sounds like it’s not even a person I’m looking for, but a complaintless drain to endlessly circle. I mean, the entire idea of cherry-picking someone to serve security detail for all my infinite vulnerabilities, expectations, and validation feels like a delusion of the highest sophistication — and that’s not even yet including the forever con. That any person is able to promise that in perpetuity. And even if they can, it’s not something I can truthfully offer in return. Forever isn’t in the budget, no matter how much you overspend.
Sometimes I message people on dating apps, pretending to be someone I’m not — by which I mean, someone chill, flirty, down for anything. (In reality, I’m down for a handful of things only.) All I have to do is dangle my interest and availability. It’s really not hard. And it’s so much easier to be attractive to someone who doesn’t know what they want. People who don’t make the effort to get clear on what they want often get swindled by those who have.
What if I was the person I’m afraid of? I think about that a lot — a threat as a hidden power dynamic. Little do they know that they’re potentially messaging with an organ harvester, eager to meet up tonight for an ice bath. It would be so easy to be evil if I weren’t so lazy. And if I knew the best place to sell kidneys at an optimum price, which I don’t. So you can rest easy, horny men of the Internet.
The baroque fears of violence I waded through in my inexperienced youth now give way to the common reality of wincing my way through romantic apathy. It’s as common as bad weather. There are not enough love languages that will cast the kind of spells to inure you from vexation or separate you from any pain you choose to hold onto.
Silence is a potent message too. And if there’s one thing I expect of the dead, it’s to keep quiet. Ghosts only exist as much as you mind them. They don’t have some unfinished business so much as I don’t think they even know what they’re doing, honestly. It’s a phenomenon almost as illogical as love. Sometimes all’s well that simply ends.
