2
So, before you decide I am a delusional maniac, let me just get this out of the way: the story of my life is not entitled Broken Girl Feels Incomplete; Seeks Boy to Make Her Feel Whole. I am not some adorably helpless 1940s movie heroine lying on a couch waiting for a man to plug into me and turn me on like a light bulb. I’m perfectly fine with being me. I mean, yeah, it kinda blows sometimes, and occasionally I wish I was Beyoncé, but I’ve pretty much accepted my fate of being Summer Martin Johnson, you know? Awkward exchanges with gas station cash register attendants and the whitest of white girl dance moves: this is the situation of Summer. And let’s get another thing out in the clear: I know I might not sound like the most realistic person in the world, wishing for this. Because let’s face it: quietly attractive twenty-four-year-old girls with stomach tubes and moderately-large facial scars aren’t exactly the most desired creatures walking the Earth, especially for shallow guys in their post-collegiate glory days who just want the hall-of-fame blondes with the sparkly lip gloss and the cutoff denim booty shorts. I get that. But something like this had been brewing for quite some time, all thanks to social media, or as I call it, the Public Bathroom Stall of the World.
If you haven’t heard of the thoroughly-modern condition known as Relationship FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), let me explain for you in big bold painful letters. There I was a few days before The Big Surgery Bomb, innocently trolling Facebook on one of those late spring Florida mornings when the wind smells like humidity and salt and you know summer is on its way and it thrills you and terrifies you in equal measure, when I was bombarded by not one, not two, but THREE engagement stories on my News Feed. What was wrong with these girls? Didn’t they know that it was early, and that my self-esteem was still fragile, and that spacing out their wedding bombshells was the right thing to do, if only until I’d injected my coffee?
But like the masochist I am, I clicked on one of the stories anyway and scrolled through the pictures of the engagement. This one belonged to Misty, this girl who’d sat behind me in high school science class and had always borrowed my pens without giving them back. For months she’d been posting about how Crazy In Love she was and about how this new guy was The One and about how Hashtag Blessed she was and generally just assaulting twelve hundred of her closest frenemies with other completely unsolicited details about her delirious happiness. And now I guess she’d finally gotten her ring in a cheesy outdoor engagement by a lake.
Okay, first of all: I want my pens back, Misty. All of them. Including that one with the dark purple ink that I really liked. And secondly: STFU. You have a guy who loves you. We get it. At the risk of sounding like a bitter old spinster clutching her pearls in jealousy, you can stop now. But even my cynicism couldn’t overcome my basic humanity, and ironically enough, at the end of the day there was nothing that could make you feel alone like the silvery, artificial glow of your laptop screen. So as I glared at the photos of Misty’s boyfriend bending down on one knee underneath their Oak Tree of Love while professing his Undying Devotion to this stupid pen thief, I couldn’t help but think to myself: why can’t someone love me like that?
And then I slapped myself in the face and tossed my phone aside, but not before screen-shotting one particularly heinous photo and reminding myself to send it to my friend Autumn to bitch about it later that day. But seriously, my qualms with the Pen Thief aside, girls were getting married by the boatload, and I couldn’t deal with it anymore. At least the Mistys of my mom’s generation surpassed her in silence – in this constantly connected age I had to deal with them vomiting their lives onto Facebook all day, every day, reminding me that I was me. I deserved love, too, no matter my present circumstances, and I didn’t know how much longer I could watch my frenemies pull ahead on the Highway of Life and live so loudly while I sat in the dark.
On a rational level I knew I was being ridiculous, of course, but still, in some deep and ancient place within me, I felt like a failure, a forgotten loss, a flash in the pan. And unfortunately for my mother, Dr. Steinberg, that random counselor lady, and the boys in my town in general, failure was not something I was accustomed to accepting. Not at all.
~
The days after the surgery news were what the word “blur” had been invented for. The operation was tentatively scheduled for the Monday after Labor Day weekend, so it was official: I was granted one final summer on the beach. Or not final summer, depending on the outcome of my surgery, or whatever. There were scores of documents to sign, tons of words to learn, a dozen therapists to pretend to listen to while they spoke to me in quietly apologetic tones, etcetera.
On day three after the big bang, a little Xanax had finally helped my mother’s anxiety levels descend to a somewhat manageable rate, and the imminent death of the day flashed a sullen yellow above the ocean to the east as she drove me home after our final consultation for a few weeks. (And I use the word “home” loosely, as I had not felt like I’d had a true home in years. Sure, I may have laid my head at my mom’s every night, but it was no longer the dwelling I’d grown up in. Things had changed and evolved and she was always off on dates trying to get remarried while my father had his wife and his other children in Orlando to deal with, which was shitty but understandable, I guess. Even my friends were starting to drift and shift and move forward in ways I seemed to not be. No matter where I went, I never really felt welcome or wanted. I was like a piece of a puzzle that had become so wet and swollen from the condensation of a glass left on a coffee table, I no longer fit anywhere – a new but permanent outlier.)
“Summer, I’m sorry about that request or whatever, with the Last Great Hope lady,” my mother finally said as she drove, mentioning the Elephant of Awkwardness we’d both avoided for days. “I didn’t mean to shut you down like that, you know. I’m just trying to protect you. That’s all I want – what’s best for you. But who knows – maybe you’ll find love someday.”
“Yeah, who knows,” I said, pursing my lips together with a secret only I knew. I was going to try.
So, it turns out there was this app called Spark. People my age were plagued by three main questions: am I ever going to grow up, am I ever going to get my shit together, and will I ever find someone, or will I die alone in a pile of cats?, and since most of my generation had already given up on the first two concepts, they were using Spark to focus on the third. After hearing two nurses gossiping about it the day after the diagnosis, I’d done some digging on Google, and it seemed I’d found my golden parachute. To make a long story short, the app let you “like” photos of nearby guys that you thought were acceptably attractive and/or not murderers, and if they “liked” you back, you could message them. This was perfect for me, and not only because I had the social skills of a rock garden and therefore found the prospect of hiding behind a screen for the unavoidably awkward first few conversations with a prospective love interest incredibly appealing. If the guys declined me, I’d never be notified, which was perfect. (I wasn’t that fragile, I just liked to avoid bad news – God knows I had enough to deal with already.) Spark was taking the world by storm and making twenty-somethings everywhere have bad dates over overpriced hors d’oeuvres at stupid hipster bars, and you’d better believe I wanted in on that awkward action before fate took me out of it. Not dying in a pile of cats was the most easily-solvable Big Life Question I could confront in the tiny window of time I’d suddenly been allotted, and Operation Find A Boy Before the Operation had officially begun.
Once we got home, Shelly whispered one final apology after a day full of them and then excused herself to her room to “call her sister.” I knew she’d really be crying silently into her pillow all alone, and the thought pounded around in my guilty chest like a dresser tumbling down a staircase during a hasty move. As she disappeared down the hallway, I went out onto the porch we’d screened into a sort of indoor/outdoor living room, slammed a comfortable spot into the supremely uncomfortable couch I’d inherited from my great grandmother, and felt my stomach rumble with something that had nothing to do with my health issues. And though the irony of curing that most human of maladies – loneliness – with a soulless app housed in a four-inch piece of glass and metal was not lost on me, my sense of humor was nothing if not morbid, especially now that my condition was now literally morbid, and so I smiled and took out my phone.
My bones shivered with a manic, reckless, thrilling energy. This was wrong. I knew that. By joining this dating app I was basically selling someone a ticket to sail on the Titanic. Even if I were to survive the surgery, the next six months of my life would still be rough – there was no doubt about that. But it was also, perhaps, my last chance at love. Life was going to destroy me anyway, be it in three months or sixty years – why not let love help finish the job, too?
And as I sat there, another thought sprung out at me like the old Jack in the Box someone had given me during an extended hospital stay that would jump out at odd hours of the night and scare me senseless: in this age of TMI, I could share anything about myself. Should I share the news about my possibly (okay, probably) impending death? Of course they deserved to know, these guys I would prospectively be matching with. But as a human, I also deserved to have someone to look at me and see me, Summer Johnson, not the Permanent Death Cloud that now hung over my shoulders like shame during a hangover meal at Arby’s. And I knew that would be impossible if someone knew the truth. Besides, I knew I couldn’t go one more day as Summer, That Girl You Treat Differently Because of The Throat Thing, and so, like the heinous bitch I am, I decided to do the most sensible thing I could imagine and download the app, take my chances, and hold the information close in the beginning. If I met anyone special I’d share that I was obviously unwell and edit out the death thing, and if things sank down deep with anyone, I’d figure out how to drop the big news then. But would I even be able to find love in such a short time?
And then I realized that in all of the madness I was overlooking the simple fact that none of this mattered unless I actually got a date, which honestly was still a major question mark for me. (Stomach tube, facial scar, shallow boys, etc.) As usual I was being a cynical, over-analytical, self-doubting mess, and so on that ratty old couch on my ratty old porch in my ratty old life, I took the deepest of breaths and then downloaded the app that would hopefully make me officially un-single for however long my personal forever would last.