You Guys Are Annoying Me

If you talk to me about your dating life, I will listen to an extent if I care about you, even though I don’t want to. In theory, I am here for you because I love you, but I’m kind of busy deciding whether or not I should get a gun. I am busy prepping, wondering what backup power sources to get, and how I might navigate evacuating from my Brooklyn apartment with my cat if I have to. I’m wondering how acidic our rain will become and how long I will have to continue boiling my fruits and vegetables before they are safe from giving me a parasitic infection. I am busy worrying about what else capitalism’s death rattle may bring.

“I can care about both.” I’m not sure you can, but I’m also in a very intolerant phase of my life, so you’ll have to pardon me because I’ve also never been prettier, so I’m not sure I’m willing to change. I think that dating as it exists prevents us from transmuting the lonely, agonized energy involuntary single people exude into action that progresses us forward. I also think that men are government drones keeping menstruating people powerless by disconnecting us from our cycles, the moon, and from each other, but who’s to say about that one. If we’re running around in circles looking for love, we will tire, extinguish ourselves chasing something that we are born with, that lives inside us and exists all around us constantly. Exhausted from working, then dating, then using whatever energy is left to feed yourself, all you’ll have the energy left to do is lay down and stare at your phone.

And what if I said two-person households keep us isolated from each other? I was raised by my parents after age 8, but before that I was surrounded by family, because my immigrant parents knew nothing but community. My aunt was a primary caretaker of mine until I hit puberty, and my maternal grandparents were always around until their deaths. I’ve heard a rumor that children were once raised communally in villages by their parents and neighbors before suburban sprawl.

One of my single friends recently texted me saying, “I think I might end up alone like you,” apropos of nothing. I read the text and looked up at my cat, who was staring back at me from across my living room, as if she read the text too and was saying, dang, that’s crazy, why’d she say that when I’m literally right here?

“I have no idea,” I said back to her aloud. We’re never alone, not even when we’re alone. The implication that I’m single not by choice is, to put it plainly, super insulting. I worry, then, if that is how other single people see the world—that those who are not partnered are involuntarily living single, and those who are have received some great gift from the beyond. How far removed is that thinking from the incel men chatting each other up on whatever loser platforms they’re using these days?

I wonder if the death grip my single friends have on the idea of a mythical, perfectly aligned partner is because of how scary everything else is. One of my best friends and I often go back and forth on the descent of the climate disaster we’re in, and on our single friends who seem to me to be concerned about the wrong things. She, an arguably more empathetic person than I am, said it’s a symptom of our nervous systems being in survival mode. Perhaps their fear of being single tells them that if they don’t have a partner they won’t be safe, while ours tells us to buy one of those lettuce towers to grow our own produce and to start canning water.

My cat is asleep next to me on my couch, her foot twitching while she dreams, belly up and mouth agape. She has no idea. Or maybe she does, because she spent an indeterminate number of years living on the street in central Brooklyn, perhaps witnessing the climate disaster on her smaller-than-average cat-sized scale. I wonder if this is her first time on earth, because my late dog told me she had been here many times, and sometimes you can just tell with animals that they’ve been here before. I’ve tried asking her using a technique I was told about, where you calmly try to send an animal a mental image; a friend of mine sent an image of a dog she was sitting to the dog where he stopped barking and laid down, and the dog did exactly that. I looked into my cat’s eyes and asked her if she’s been here before with an image of the earth, and she sent me back an image of cheese.

Last week I dreamt 8 bees stung me and instead of panicking I stayed perfectly still, hoping they would unwind their stingers from me and fly away. I didn’t even know this was possible until I saw a video of a man who was stung by a bee and instead of flicking her off, ripping her body in half and killing her, he took his arm to a safe and covered spot by a tree to give her the chance to unwind her stinger. It took a very long time, longer than my attention span could withstand as a viewer, but she unwound it eventually and flew away.

In my dream the bees burrowed into my skin and the person I was with said I needed to pull them out but I refused because I didn’t want them to die. I’ve actually never been stung by a bee, or anything, and have been afraid of being stung my entire life. I used to run at the sight of a bee or a wasp, breaking into a full-speed sprint in any direction, hoping my agility outpaced theirs. On a trip to the New Jersey Six Flags in college, my friend Lexi and I couldn’t stay still while our group ate lunch, bees swarming the table in the damp August heat. I took one bite of a hot dog before I heard a buzz and screamed, Lexi and I booking it, running and weaving around the table like we were in a scrimmage. A few years ago, my friend discovered a bee infestation in her home, thousands of bees burrowing into the walls of her duplex in Los Angeles, forced to create a home amidst the destruction of their natural habitats (trees).

I love my life. I’m incredibly privileged and am looking forward to my 30s. I also would pay $100 for a safe Jersey Mike’s turkey sandwich right now. Why on earth do we import lettuce? Wasn’t the whole point of America’s western expansion (genocide) to have room for agriculture, and we aren’t even doing that?

I was born outside Boston, Massachusetts and raised in the midwest. I’ve never lived anywhere outside of the United States, and I am begrudgingly holding onto an idea of this country that I was sold when I was younger and watched Barack Obama be elected president. I assumed that meant things would only get better, once he was succeeded, he’d be the worst president we’d ever have. I love this country in a James Baldwin way.1 I love my friends and my neighbors and a culture that gave the world jazz and hip hop and the best movies and TV. I love the idea of an America that may still be possible. We had a mock election at my school on that Tuesday in 2008, one that I gave no thought to until I sat next to my neighbor on the bus ride home and asked her if she was excited to see Obama win when we got home (my parents had planned a watch party) becuase it was kind of like we voted for him, even though we’re twelve, and she said, “No, I voted for John McCain because I like his policies better.”

“I think that might be racist,” I said, and we stopped being friends. I am not exaggerating or fabricating this story in the slightest. Evidence of a resistant human population was all around me, but I chose to ignore it and hope that eventually everyone sees the light of collectivism.

My childhood best friend (who no longer speaks to me but who I miss every day, in case they see this) took me to a climate change demonstration in 2016, where he held up a hand-painted sign that read “I SCREAM” underneath a melting earth perched atop an ice cream cone. This morning I read that the warming earth is a primary cause of foodborne illness outbreaks and that, because it will only get hotter and wetter, the outbreaks will only get worse. I cannot talk to anyone–not even my friends, let alone a stranger–without bringing up our perishing civilization, so maybe that is why I find the prospect of caring about romance difficult. How can I try to build a life with someone on land that is burning? Siri?

Whatever. Worry about what you will, but if it’s being single, there are too many books to read, movies to watch, appointments to schedule (when was the last time you went to the dentist?), neighbors to feed and produce to boil for me to really believe it’s worth agonizing over, so I’m not going to listen anymore. Sorry! Love and light xx