Sunglasses Always Fit

The other night our neighbor came over to say the water in the building was out. Which was a bummer because I was disgusting and needed a shower. But a few hours later our sink was still working, so I decided our apartment was probably cool and hopped in the shower. Two minutes later, with shampoo in my dirty hair and indulging in my once-a-week face wash, the water trickled out into nothing and I started screaming “HALP. HALP.” My roommate stood outside my door and we brainstormed and I swatted blindly at a mosquito until she returned with a 2-liter bottle of freezing water from the fridge, which I splashed onto myself, shrieking the entire time, until I was decently de-bubbled.

A few hours later, I was lying in bed in that precious space between when you have woken up and when your alarm will ring, listening to the rain falling outside. When I suddenly realized that the rain sounded rather inside. Turns out I had never turned off the water knob in the shower after being set adrift on memory bliss of clean hair, and found that it had been running long enough during the night to completely flood my bathroom, as my bathroom is too small to shut the shower door if you want to be inside it at the same time.

It’s amazing how quickly one can go from dreamy dreamland to full on four-letter-word panic mode – wondering if the water would float out the dead monster roach I had been letting disintegrate under the bathroom sink, feeling like my life was very unfair to be robbed of an hour of sleep to mop up a bathroom, bleary-eyed with my mouthguard still in, and for some reason feeling sure that this would not be as bad of a situation if I were married and could have some help or at least someone to laugh with over the matter.

Later that morning, while trying to go-go-Gadget my arms to pull a particularly stubborn zipper up the back of my dress, silently cursing my roommate for daring to travel during the week I decided to wear the dress for the first time, leaving me in sweaty frustration spouting more four-letter words, I again acutely felt my singleness. “If I were married I could wear all kinds of things with difficult zippers because someone would always be here. I could even wear bracelets with tricky clasps.” (I talk in italics a lot.)

For some reason lately, there seem to a lot of these (some normal and some not so normal) “if I weren’t single, this would be easier/better/funner/sexier/less scary” trigger moments in my life. There are the usual ones:

Another engagement/wedding/baby/house-buying announcement on Facebook. Or when one of my friends gets married and I never hear from them again because they’re too busy having all the relationship and sex I never have and buying the houses I can’t afford and adult-ing. Whatever. This is particularly painful when people younger than me get married – especially kids I mentored in youth groups.

There is every time I have to move something heavy and possibly encounter rodents or insects underneath it. And every time I have to consider a big purchase, or a technical or an electronic purchase. I am a pretty independent person, sometimes to a fault, but despite all my “I can do it myself rah rah I’m a feminist and don’t need a man-fish riding a bicycle” attitude, I’d 100% rather someone tall-dark-and-handsome take care of it for me.

There’s every time I get my oil changed. Every time a man looks at me funny. Or I am anywhere by myself when it’s dark. Or see old people holding hands. Or read a really good love scene in a book and calculate how long it’s been since I’ve been really kissed (and I know the date how weird is that). Or stand in my kitchen and realize I am trying to fill the void within with obscene amounts of ice cream, and it will be harder for me to find love if I eat so much ice cream I can’t fit out my door, but keep eating it anyway.

And now it’s every time I get my period and feel the need to have to pep talk with my ovaries about saving some good eggs for the fertilization I promise is coming. Maybe that’s totally weird. Luckily one of my bests down here is almost as inappropriate as I am sometimes (humor is a very good self-defense mechanism against the realities of your life) and so when I tell her things like there are tiny fish in the Amazon that can swim up a man’s man-part and damage things, she will totally roll with me in praying for our future husbands’ genitals – that they may be protected from vicious aquatic attack, just as we pray for the health and safety of our fallopian tubes or whatever other science bits are down there that bring babies into the world.

Will anyone ever love someone who thinks her armpits smell like french fries and eats guacamole for breakfast? Who would have her dog in her MySpace Top 8? Whose greatest dream in life is to own a goat?

The suspense is killing me. Just keep praying a holy ruckus for this future husband of mine. He will need all the prayer he can get.

Until then…ice cream. All the ice cream.