Week One: Today I met the most amazing girl! She’s so quirky and weird. She wears glasses and hats that clash with her rompers. Wow, she even has a high-pitched stuttering nerd voice that betrays infinite mysteries. She’s so accessibly vulnerably palpably hot. She’s there, but she’s not quite there. Deep weightlessness. And it’s definitely genuine—nothing about it is a character or a calculated persona or my own concept of womanhood that helps excuse my stunted maturity.
“Hi, my name is Steve, I couldn’t help but notice you rode a bicycle clumsily and fell down getting off of it. Or was that my fevered imagination? In any case, would you like to go to dinner sometime?”
I don’t even know her. But I do. I want to marry her and sleep by her side forever.
Week Two: This has been the best week of my life that I can conceivably remember. We sang karaoke. She noticed me brooding and told me I looked sensitive. She’s always giggling, playing ukulele, and running around like a fairy. She kisses the back of my neck when I’m working on my novel or screenplay. I really am falling in love with this girl. Our souls match—unlike her delightful unconventional sock collection!
She says she wants to take me on adventures. I feel…what’s the word…complete? Alive? Saved?
Week Three: This week has been great! She made me a mixtape on a cassette. A cassette! She cooks food in her underwear and invents aphorisms and leave her ballet flats everywhere. I mean, it’s fine, but like, everywhere. She’s so messy. It’s adorable. I admire her self-conscious unselfconsciousness. She chatters a lot in her sleep, which is childlike and endearing, not too annoying. I like this girl.
Week Four: It’s going good. Well. I don’t know. She still plays her ukulele and kisses the back of my neck when I’m really trying to get work done. It’s like she’s from another planet where she doesn’t understand that Earth money is made from work—not drawing pictures of cows with stars for eyes. It’s so eccentric and charming. … But when I sort of snapped at her for not giving me space, she cried sitting down in the shower for an hour. But she is really sweet. I think I’m starting to like this girl.
Week Five: Honestly it’s been difficult. It’s challenging to sleep next to someone whimpering in her sleep like an out-of-tune Bjork song on a loop. She’s in her late 20s and still acts like a spastic kid who dresses like a garden gnome. I don’t wanna fuck a kid and/or a garden gnome! She wanted to sing karaoke the other night. Who likes karaoke? Idiots who wear cat cardigans to job interviews, that’s who. Later, we were walking down the street and some bar was playing a ballad and she tried to make me dance with her outside in the cold. I told her I just want to go home and watch Game of Thrones, like an adult, and she asked me if I loved her and when I said I don’t know she just got on a random bus, a random one, without looking at the number. What a dummy. A sui generis dummy. How does she even get her shoes on the right feet? Sometimes she has mismatched shoes, but, oh god, is that on purpose or not? Ugggh. No, I mean, I do think she’s cute.
Week Six: What kind of fucking adult makes cassette mixtapes? Everything is on Spotify now, and this grown woman gave me a fucking cassette tape she wrapped in flowers and weeds she stole from a neighbor’s garden. I kind of hope she got poison ivy. Just kidding. I think. She’s likeable.
Week Seven: I just keep thinking, Who is this girl? But the tone in my head is different than when I first asked myself this question.
Week Eight: I tried to have an adult conversation with her today, but she kept slipping into song. She’s really freefalling on the spectrum of dewy to damaged. Not as cute. I don’t like it.
Week Nine: Stop talking to birds!
Week Ten: Oh. Oh, god. So tired.
Week Ten and a Half: THROW THAT DEAD MOUSE AWAY RIGHT THE FUCK NOW. YOU CAN’T SAVE ITS SPIRIT.
Week Eleven: Are you serious? Nothing about this is a character?
Week Twelve: Tearful goodbye at the mental institution today.
Week Twelve (ten minutes later): Met a nice new girl at the mental institution today.
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Rumpus original art by Annie Daly.
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4 responses
HILARIOUS! And I’ve been that guy.
“Dewy to damaged”– !! Oh so funny. I loved the whole piece.
This was HILARIOUS! Too often these days are women romanticized to be, instead of the cheerleader, that quirky cat-loving and glasses-wearing girl who is just sweet enough to make you want to talk to her, and just weird enough to make you feel like you’ll never have worry about getting her to like you. Breaking down this stereotype that’s everywhere in young adult fiction these days is, in a word, awesome. Manic pixie dream girls just don’t exist in real life. And if one does, you should probably move on to not a girl, but, you know… a real, living, breathing, thinking woman.
YES. This is where it’s at. It doth warm mine heart. Barbara, if you’re ever in Spokane, let me buy you a beer/wine/vowel.
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