Broken - word vomit.

Broken. Ruined from adolescence. The shame having raw emotions poured out for public consumption through a sieve of ridicule. Tears. Internal ruts from the many rivulets. Words writ with quiet patience and hope burning to ashes in the fires of public humiliation. That’s what its like to have your the diary that holds the secrets of your 14 year old heart read in front of the family as a lesson. To have the very idea of your dreams reduced to puppy love. A concept that does not entail the carefree happiness the rest of the world understands it to be, but instead an indication of how pathetic the possibility is. Tender shoots straining for light under a shroud of legalism are crushed for reasons that are still inexplicable 20 years later, and you wonder why I’m single.


I was taught from my first crush on Joseph at 10 yrs old that with enough effort, I could suppress those urges. Urges - a word of said with the sneer of derision. A word that should imply desire and the possibility of euphoria within the scope of our lowly human bodies, .instead gives me an internal shudder. Much like the words puppy love make me immediately and irrationally angry, still, 20 years later.

When the average adolescent was learning to traverse the high and lows, joys and heartbreaks of interacting with their object of affection, I was learning to bury those feelings deep deep inside. Now that cavern is so deep I couldn’t find them even with trying at the very bottom. Its just too deep. The lessons you learn of flirting and talking and communicating with the opposite sex were lost to me, unrecoverable in the past where they were supposed to be learned. And you wonder Why I’m single.

The men willing to know me are patient because they understand the concept of internal struggle. It’s no wonder they have all been homosexuals. Thus, the men I fall in love with have been just that. When finally I risk all my hopes on someone that you might call less than perfect, what happens? He turns out to be gay. Ten years later, when I was able to dredge up all those buried treasures of my personality and psyche it was a on someone who made it safe to do so, then fell in love with someone else. So what does this teach. that there is no point in taking the risk. The risk of humiliation. The risk of pain again. The sacrifice is only going to be thrown back in my face, a punishment for succumbing to my primal and romantic instinct instead of ruling it as I’d been taught to do as a teenager.

Another ten years, a career later, a hundred pounds more, a lifetime past the happiness of my peers, its all gone. The hope of possibility. To make matters worse, I can feel the pity from friends, acquaintances, and family. Poor thing should have gotten married before she got fat. Now she’ll never get a man. My mom’s obvious attempts to teach me now what she failed to at 15. “You have to seize whats available to you,” she says with condescension simmering in her voice. “Bake the UPS man brownies or talk to the mailman when he comes by.” Gee, mom, thanks for the idea. I hadn’t realized I was quite that pathetic, but thanks for the reminder of perspective.

So again, tears trickle from an adult broken in adolescence. An adolescent buried under the humiliations of a pathetic woman. Humiliation in the sideways glances from those that pity you in the grocery store, at church and on the sidewalk. The slow death of seemingly undying hope every time a box needs checked on a survey - single, never married. The quiet crush of a wounded soul trying again to rise from the grave of social banishment as people stop inviting you because you cannot find a date. It would be easier if I were the feared lesbian. At least then I could use society or religion as a reason for my dreaded singleness. Instead I bear the contagion that is pure and unrelenting loneliness wrought from a heart that cannot be broken because it may not ever have grown up whole.