She gestures to me – mimicking a pen and paper… You need to write this down.

I owe her $150. She hasn’t quite figured out Venmo and the money just sits there, but the advice is good. I’m going to have to pay up for it. It’s good shit.

It’s worth every penny that I haven’t paid yet.

He is your practice. My practice of saying what I need to say.

But this is the hard part. What I want to say is that I want you to not want me.  I want you to be disgusted by my drooping 40 year old breasts. The cellulite on my ass. My mother’s apron (no matter how much weight I lose it never goes away). I want you to leave me alone and validate the feeling that I don’t deserve your attention or the attention and love of any man.

There are literally a million or more women in the world that have tighter asses than mine. Younger, hotter… Asian. Things I can never be.

Because do you know what would be worse? You wanting to be with me. That would be truly terrifying. Things working out. Would be truly terrifying. You or anyone else seeing me. Devastating.

Me having to be honest with you? Worse than a thousand episodes of cheating with a mega hot babe that has a better job, thicker hair, bigger boobs and a decade less of traction on her.

So much worse. 

That I would have to admit to you and anyone else that has ever known me in that way, that my need for love was larger than a pre-historic sea. Think Great Basin large. No one, and I mean no one… will be able to satisfy me. The cold chill that I know I will be the only one that will be able to comfort me in the middle of the empty night is the frigid millstone that I will always have around my neck. I will forever be my own worst enemy. I will forever feel alone.

As it stands now.

Secretly… I want to tell you how much I want you. All of you. How much I need you. All of you. How I wish I were the only one. How I would cry an endless amount of tears if that ever happened.

And I say “you” but I really mean every “you” that has crossed my path. “You” are all the same, and all different. Even the “you” that never made it past the bad cologne and theater date. “You” will be “you” until “you” have a name and a place.

Or maybe not.

This is only practice.