An introduction

Who are you?

You don't really want to know.  You think you do, but if I started telling my story, my whole story, and if we were sitting across from each other in a diner or a bar or a table on a train, I'd notice your eyes glazing over, the rapt attention slackening as you found a ball of lint on your sweater or an interesting bush outside the window imminently more fascinating than the words my voice was making that had started to detach from meaning in your mind, had become blobs of sound with inflection but no true purpose.  Your fist would clench under the table as you realized your immense regret for ever having asked.

I'm ravenous for attention, you know.  There's a deep well of need in my heart that I'm desperate to fill, have been for many many years now.  34, to be exact.  Though I suppose there were moments as a baby where I was relatively satisfied.  Certainly I was fussed over enough as a newborn to not be frustrated with a lack of attention there.  But maybe it was those few months that spoiled me forever, that brief period of being doted on by anyone and everyone that twisted my expectations into a vast ocean of need that can never really be met.  Charming, I know.  Men love it, I have to say.  That's sarcasm, men don't like it at all when you need things, or maybe there's a certain amount that it's okay to need and that's not enough for me.  Which is to say beyond the odd flirtation I am pretty solidly single.  Not the exciting, cosmopolitan, I can have sex with whoever I want! version of single either.  I mean, I can.  Have sex with whoever I want.  And I guess I do, to some extent, but I learned a while ago that sex without some emotional connection is deeeepressing.  Who wants to be naked and splayed out in someone else's bed post-coitus thinking about how long it's okay to lie there before it's time to shake hands (very businesslike) and go home?  Well, not me.  So I live alone, I sleep alone, I cook alone, I watch TV alone, I go to movies alone, I write alone.  Unless you count the need, which is always with me in one form or another, quietly whispering in my ear about how much more wonderful my life would be if there was just someone else here.  The need makes me scroll through profiles on Ok Cupid, searching for just the right one who will understand me, whose love will be more than just a drop in the bucket but will somehow cause the well to overflow.  The need is not rational.  It's also really bad at psychology and interpersonal relations, because I know someone else can't fix that shit.  I've always known.  I don't quite know how to do it myself though.  Things I've tried have not worked so well.  Of course to date, "things I've tried" to fill up my need well are mostly food-related.  That is to say, food.  It makes logical sense, right?  The well is in my midsection somewhere, my mouth hole seems to lead to that general area, so I send down Ho-hos and Wheat Thins and Cheese Pizza and Oreo Ice Cream in hopes that they will work together to form some kind of magic conglomeration that will spackle that thing shut.  So far it hasn't happened, but I have hope for the future.

So that's a little something.  We've got two whole weeks of soul-baring business coming up, I don't want to give up the goods too easily.

This post is part of The Scintilla Project.