Dear Miserable Bastard Whom Everbody Hates,

Is it really that time again? Walking around, head down, hating the T-shirt you've got on, believing wholeheartedly in your own ugliness, Smiths lyrics STILL tumbling out of your lips, sometimes not quietly. I mean it's a joke, right? Please tell me you're joking.

I didn't think so.

Or walking around, head up, SCOWLING. I mean really scowling. At everybody. The lady walking to the gym with her tennis racket. The guy buying a book. The two girls walking towards you in their sunglasses. Everyone's a goner. Everyone's dead. No one's got a chance.

And this is the life you said you wanted, or implied that you wanted. Where everything's a try at nothing, and loneliness is just part of your weekly pay. Loneliness is just fucking bred into it, man. When will that finally dawn on you? When will that sink in?

I mean, do you really WANT companionship, you miserable bastard who sweats at parties??? (see: last night.) Be better about it. You're old enough. Get tough about it. This is it.

You will live your life as you will undoubtedly die, alone.

Huh. Doesn't have the same pop in the second person.

Let's try the third.

"He went to bed thinking of her, ironed his shirts before bed thinking of her, the woman in his life, his new best friend. Amazing how big a difference it made. The effects of his time without a woman’s hand in his daily movements were now glaring, ugly, and more than a little scary. He’d spent the latter half of the previous twelve months like some hideous stereotype of a guy with a grudge. Disliking women, or almost. Really starting to think—to himself even, not just while mouthing off—that women were untrustworthy and generally incompatible with straight males. It was something he had been dying to tell his therapist, but kept forgetting to bring up. He wanted to discuss this new instinct he seemed to be fighting to sneer at attractive women, to facially say, “Fuck you.” Sometimes he actually lost that fight. The sneer came out, or started to. Sometimes he felt his lip curling up Elvis-style while in a crush of people, unable to hide his disgust any longer, sometimes just at the people walking downtown who had the audacity to appear content or excited about something, but especially at potential mates. Some days, at the sight of a beautiful girl, he felt his upper lip tugging his whole body up and to the left. He needed his therapist’s reassurance on the subject, that he was not turning into that asshole, that he was not on the verge of becoming one of those brutes whose philosophy he had been desperate to show womankind he would always reject. Girl-hating was the ultimate failure, and one that he had to avoid, because he’d already hit all the others. The last four years had undone his optimism and all of his cleaner instincts. He had begun to seethe and spout poison. He was now a walking stereotype, a Biff Loman who had lost confidence in his every talent and faith in all human gentleness and went around spilling bile in cafés and corner shops. But he kept forgetting to ask her. He and his therapist spent the bulk of the session talking about his career moves, then his mother, and then his therapist’s personal life.

Then Anna replaced the need to ask. Now, with her, everything about the city, everything in the increasingly dank attic that was his humanity, was a survivable trial. He was almost not miserable. Best of all, he saw her five day of the week. He would see her tomorrow, in fact. He would walk right over to her desk and she would smile at him without his having to do anything. She’d light up like she’d just gotten an email from him saying, “How soon can you pack? We’re going to sail around the world on my friend’s boat.” And this image of her face, this unmistakable feeling of being loved by the perfect woman, this wonderful older woman, kept him bent over the ironing board, ignoring the kink in his back, flattening that same striped dress shirt he had washed and pressed about a thousand times that summer and which had permanent sweat stains set in by constant ironing. And after receiving that smile of hers, he knew the go ahead to flirt with her was guaranteed, and that there was no fear of saying the wrong thing. And she would flirt back, reliably and honorably, and God what a thing that was for a man. He’d forgotten how essential to living it was – how it got everything working, muscles moving, ideas flowing, the right amount of ego expanding in just the right direction, and keeps memories just where they’re supposed to be, somewhere in the back lane of the brain. They don’t predict the future nearly as much as they once did, thank the great good fucking Lord."