Breakfast at Tiffany's

… I installed myself comfortably on the couch. The decors around me were reassuringly those of a trendy but cozy café. I opened my book and reclined to savor the coming moments of self-definition. The scene was quaintly familiar. I was simply preparing to meet another guy with whom I had exchanged on msn some insignificant words punctuated by brief instants of unjustified hard-core expressions of jubilation; I was about to meet my blind date that is.
I looked at my watch frenetically from time to time. He was late but I was strangely relieved. I had time to readjust the small details of the image I was intending to project. Shall I look like an experienced blasé character whose mind is focused on recounting an accumulation of bold adventures and mischievous tendencies? Or shall I radiate a childish energy, that of a teenager open and excited about the dullest details of life? These were a bit the questions that floated between the lines of the book I was pretending to read.
I felt suddenly face-to-face with someone I supposedly know very well: myself. But this self was stuffed with incongruities and imperfections. I now had the duty of “deconstructing” myself and then patching the pieces back together by adding a charming thought here, a witty observation and a predatory look there. I had to save myself and the other from getting acquainted with the real me. I felt like a romantically helpless character in a black and white movie. I was like locked up in a perfectly neat bedroom writing in a frenzy a letter to a lover and then repeatedly tearing it to start all over again.
As I got tired from arranging tediously in my head the events of my life in an intriguing fashion, it suddenly hit me that I had not yet started seriously drawing the fanciful traits of my blind date. I knew deep inside that I had to take delight in this orgy of concocted images and delusions. Only because the moment of dull reality was getting near. My upcoming story with this stranger -no matter if it would last for minutes or years- was already known to me. At the moment, I refused to admit it as usual. No matter how much I try to lure myself that the future of my relationships would not be bleak and cling to the hope that magic would majestically prevail at the end, I always find myself screaming a dramatic “Ahhhh” while falling from the high towers of my expectations.
Anyhow, my whimsical mental masturbation was abruptly interrupted by his arrival. What followed next was the usual mix of intermittent wows of admiration and recurrent pffts of deception. I remember that as reality came into focus, I was already losing interest in myself and him. One thought struck me. I was summing up in a perturbing condense fashion the last years of my life when I realized how often I had done that. It was like a sounding alarm of what my life has been reduced to. Jumping on a train to meet a stranger, throwing at him my stuffed life, dreams, thoughts, visions in a ready-to-use can and then jumping off to catch the next train. That was what my “love” life was reduced to! I felt I was doomed to repeat endlessly the tail of my past life to strangers in an attempt to impress and arouse curiosity and attraction. I was like Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill of desires and expectations only to watch it later roll down mockingly and carelessly. But I had the seeming luxury of rolling up a different stone each time. It was even more depressing and more illusionary. I was lured by the different hair colors, heights, width, body expressions, voice… The bottom line was, it was all the same, cruelly the same story.
Later that day, I went to bed for a stranger. Needless to say I was already a sedated corpse by then. © El Matador