It’s heartbreaking, they say.
That’s the first word, isn’t it? “Heartbreaking.” A soft, gentle, and completely bullshit word for a truth that’s as hard and as clean as a piece of broken glass. It’s not heartbreaking. It’s goddamn liberating.
It’s the moment the fever finally breaks, and you wake up in a cold sweat, in the middle of a long, dark night, and you finally, after all these years, see the room for what it is. A goddamn prison.
And the truth, the beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary truth that you finally come to terms with, is this:
Maybe the safest way to live is alone.
That’s not a cry for help. That’s a goddamn declaration of independence.
You start to realize you’re getting older. The cheap, easy highs of your youth don’t work anymore. The women, the booze, the fights… they’re just a different kind of tired. And the idea of finding someone to “build a life with,” that pretty little fairy tale they sell you from the day you’re born, you start to see it for what it is: a marketing campaign for a product that doesn’t exist anymore.
Most people you meet out there, in the quiet, desperate wasteland of modern dating, they’re not looking for a partner. They’re looking for a goddamn hostage.
They’re either too trapped in themselves, a beautiful, self-sustaining ecosystem of their own bullshit, or they’re still chasing the streets, looking for a younger, hotter, and more exciting version of a past that’s already dead and buried. They’re stuck on an ex, a quiet, sad ghost that sits between you in the bed and watches you with cold, dead eyes. They’re trapped in a history they don’t have the guts to burn down.
Or, and this is the most dangerous kind, they come into your life just long enough to confuse you.
These are the real artists of the modern age. The psychological vampires. They want you, but not enough to choose you. And they won’t let you go. They’ll keep you on a long, invisible leash, just close enough to feel the warmth of a real, honest-to-God connection, but never close enough to actually touch it. They’ll feed on your energy, your hope, your quiet, stupid desire for something real, and they’ll give you just enough to keep you from starving to death. And they do it all with a sad, beautiful, and completely fraudulent smile on their face.
We’re living in a time where being toxic is normalized. It’s not a bug; it’s a goddamn feature of the new operating system. And it’s depressing to admit, but being single might be the only way to truly protect your peace and your mental health. It’s not a failure; it’s a strategic retreat from a war you can’t win. A sane man doesn’t keep charging into a goddamn machine gun nest just because he’s been told that’s what a good soldier is supposed to do.
Relationships today, they feel nearly impossible. So many people, they lack the basic, fundamental building blocks of a real connection. Honesty. Consistency. Real, goddamn, down-in-the-dirt communication. They don’t talk; they perform. They send you a curated collection of their greatest hits, their best angles, their prettiest lies. And they expect you to fall in love with the press release.
And the worst part? The part that really grinds you down to a nub, the part that makes you want to just sit in a dark room with a bottle and wait for the end?
It’s knowing exactly what you have to offer.
It’s knowing that you’ve done the work. You’ve been through the fire. You’ve seen the bottom, and you’ve crawled your way back up, with your fingernails bloody and your soul full of beautiful, ugly scars. You’ve built a life. A real one. You’ve built a goddamn table with your own two hands, a sturdy, honest, and beautiful piece of furniture. And you’re just looking for someone who has a table worth bringing it to.
But you look around, and all you see are people who are eating their dinner off a goddamn paper plate, in the middle of a burning room, complaining that the food is cold.
So you make a choice.
You can stand there, in the middle of the fire, holding your beautiful, useless table, and you can let the smoke fill your lungs and the flames lick at your feet.
Or you can just walk away.
You can take your table, and you can find a quiet, empty room, and you can sit down, by yourself, and you can have a goddamn meal in peace.
That’s not heartbreaking.
That’s survival. That’s the last, quiet, beautiful, and completely honest victory a man can hope for in a world that’s gone completely, beautifully, and terrifyingly insane.
