Single fat female: Are there lessons in loneliness?

You know, my ex once said, “You are going to be alone forever.”

I laughed at him.

I still make jokes about it with my friends. But there are moments when I am putting myself to bed or sitting on the arm of my couch in the morning, staring out the back door and waiting for my dog to go to the bathroom. There are moments when I know he was right.

The rest of the day, I do my best to rage against those six words. I make small talk, I smile at every stranger, I endlessly swipe on profiles, I visualize some ambiguous happy future that I know I’ll never quite wrap my fingers around. Occasionally, when I am feeling ambitious enough, I convince myself that I can have something real with a lanky, intellectual guy who looks at me with wonder in his eyes. He tells me he thinks I’m “different from all the rest.”

He’s not wrong. Of course I am. But it’s not the sweet sentiment it is intended to be.

I am different because I’m a joke that doesn’t quite make sense, a puzzle without any edge pieces, a computer with all its hardware on the outside. Yeah, I still function but the idea of me is always better than the reality.

Inevitably, I will come back to my senses, tell the lanky guy that we need to talk, and press my fingertip on the repeat…