Trending Now: Finding Happiness
My mom told my grandma I had to leave home. “She’s going to find her happiness,” she said.
I begged her to stop saying that to the neighbors and the hair stylist and the gynecologist, mid-pap smear.
“It just makes me sound like a lost wanderer.”
One time I did wander into Starbucks to meet a guy that the Match.com Minions paired me up with. He was about five inches shorter than his posed-on-a-rock profile shot led me to believe. And he babbled about this $600 gold frame he bought his dad for Christmas for (honestly) a solid 12 minutes.
Then he moved right along to the gifts for his mom and his two sisters, and I think he had a brother. All of them would receive gifts. Lavish gifts. That he had already written on a list, purchased, crossed off, and wrapped and tied with a bow. And it was like November, as in, I was still digesting turkey.
“I haven’t even started thinking about Christmas presents…at all,” I said, barely squeaking a peep between his word vomits that sprinted to the finish line. I finally understood the saying — “a mile a minute.”
News flash: the only finish line we crossed was the glorious moment when I sipped the gritty coffee grounds at the bottom of my cup.
“We’ll be in touch,” I said, amid a half awkward hug and full incredible lie.
In my defense, I only started on the whole online dating trek after my Pastor suggested that maybe God gifted people to invent the technology to connect me to my future husband. After only a few clicks and $49.99 per month for 12 months on 3 different sites (to give God more opportunity to work miracles), I could picture my name plastered on the next bestseller down the self-help aisle: Finding Happiness.
While obsessing over how many smiles flooded my inbox, I wondered if happiness even asked to be found?
As if the gold-framed soliloquy wasn’t enough to send me sprinting to a nunnery, I continued accepting smiles and put myself through another round of self-inflicted torture. (Maybe that’s a little dramatic.)
The second guy wasn’t terrible, if you enjoy marveling over someone developing laryngitis through the improper use of vocal cords to yell — in a public setting — at a bunch of padded boys tackling each other and killing brain cells over a little pigskin. His pleas to “fire the flippin’ quarterback!!!” reverberated through the room, sending chills down my spine. For my whispering self, who teachers told my mom starting in first grade that they were concerned that I was mute, the bulging veins at an inanimate object triggered my arm in the air, practically begging for the check.
I’ll confess: I stopped answering emails and instantly wanted to reclaim all the spots around town tainted with online-dating residue. The text message on February 15th — “Hey Ashley. How are you doing?” — didn’t even nudge my interest. Everyone knows the world pukes love the day before and the table-for-one crowd sulks in desperation. But I wasn’t caving into Hallmark’s schemes. I decided to click the unsubscribe button faster than any snarky remark spews out of my mouth after my mom jokes that I should freeze my eggs.
And here’s what I learned about online dating: there isn’t a place to list that because you’re sick, you aren’t entirely certain about your future.
No, I’m not Jamie Sullivan from A Walk to Remember holding out on telling Landon Carter that she’s dying of leukemia. I have an autoimmune disorder called Sjögren’s that steals the blood from my fingers and the saliva from my decaying teeth, but mostly it dictates an early bedtime and perpetual googling of suspicious lumps and how long I’ll live.
Since being diagnosed at 16, I am stable and monitored and you probably wouldn’t know anything was wrong unless you saw me scrubbing my dried-out contacts in the bathroom or heard my coworkers joke that I’m frail.
The frailness maybe brings a few more challenges as I prepare to fly away from the nest.
But I want you to know that I’m not lost.
I know exactly where I’m going.
Some days I don’t feel the happiest when my body moans and my gas tank is bone-dry. But I have a lot of things in my life that overflow my tank.
I’m not going away to find my husband. Sure, if he’s there, I won’t send him back.
I hope that he’ll have already read this and we can skip the part where I have no idea where to type into a box that I carry around a pill divider labeled Monday through Friday that resembles the one in his grandma’s satchel.
Maybe we’ll just skip ahead to living happily ever after as totally-not-lost wanderers.
I think I could accept that smile.
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