Have you ever met someone, someone who said  ”I know you, you’re ____ ______” and you started dating seeing each other more often and the best date you’ve ever had in your life was his idea to come over to your house & order pizza & play MYST and you thought the was the absolute most romantic thing ever and then all of a sudden you’re not talking and you send packages to him that are returned with the USPS-issued stamp of UNCLAIMED all over it and you try to pretend everything is okay and then you travel to his new city to see his art show and even though you know it’s over you come home feeling like an idiot and crying the entire flight and then you call him on his birthday the next year and unload everything you’ve been feeling and five years later you’re vacationing in the new town he lives in and you agree to meet him and you dress like a total idiot because you’re so nervous and meet him at a pub and pretend like everything’s okay, which it is, but you still find yourself looking at his Twitter feed ten years after that last trip and understanding how obvious it was that someone like him could never end up with someone like you because you’re the one doing a late night google search and that you are, without a doubt, the last thing on his mind, and you also realize that people like him will never, ever, end up with people like you because (according to the exhaustive search) he’s ended up with someone that has drive, interests and a steady career and who is someone that is stable and has no destructive habits and is open and honest and accepts his partner’s faults and admits his own while at the same time allows his partners interests to flourish and all the while you, in the existence you’ve created for yourself is on a slow steady track of decline and it seems that regardless how hard you try you’re never going to be as fruitful as you were two, five or ten years ago and you wonder what your future will be like as this person you occasionally think of buys a house, obtains more pets and sharpens more skills, and all your future is going to consisting of is a 30% paycut in a tedious job that you’ll hate from day one and be forced to stay in for the next twenty years because who is going to hire a middle-aged man skilled in a dying profession and what is there to look forward in that?

I have.