happy – Page 2 – Prattle Peach

I can’t wait to meet you! But I totally can

I was talking to my friend about finding love and they’re impatient about how long it’s going to take them.

I’m off the dating app thing, and I know I won’t go back to them. I hate feeling like people are so easily replaced, and texting back in forth before ever meeting has always ruined things for me. People are never who you build them up to be in your head, and it just becomes a waste of time. It all feels so forced and it just hasn’t worked for me.

I’m so excited for when I get to meet the person I will fall in love with, but I can wait. There’s something comforting about knowing that while I’m making myself into the best person I can be, someone is out there making themself into the best person they can be for me too.

I hope I’ll know when I meet someone special, and I hope I’ll be ready for it. Until then, I’m excited to see what happens during the in-between. I want to travel and write and get to know myself better. There are a lot of things I’d like to accomplish before that, and I will have so many stories to tell my person.

I am excited! I can’t wait to love you with everything I’ve got, but I can also definitely wait. It won’t be wasted time. You’ll be worth the wait.

block ‘em, block ‘em all!!!!

The holidays scare away all the boys who only want to come over after 10:36 p.m. They don’t return until after the yucky cuffing and cuddling season is over, until the fireworks are in the air and it’s a new year so the coast is clear!!! The Women Are Over Their Need To Have A Fulfilling Relationship. We Are Safe Until October.

They’ll be the first to wish you happy new year and the first to swipe up on your selfies and reply on Snapchat. They’ll even send you a DM of your own Instagram picture and tell you how delicious you look (because you do!) but they won’t comment publicly. Of course not.

One will tell you how much he missed you and how busy he was, and you’ll think Really? Busy in the middle of this pandemic, even? Wow gosh gee whiz. How surprising! Except for the part where it isn’t surprising because it never is. This would be the third chance you’ve given him to suddenly fall in love with you and not just use you like a blowup doll. Do you think the third time’s a charm?

One will say he just used this time to really focus on work, and you’ll ask Oh well have you become very successful then? Have you lived up to your big talk about how much money you can make? And he will say this new year looks very promising, very lucrative, and can you send a picture?

One will say he shut everybody out, it’s not just you. He barely talked to his friends, even. He’s so sorry about that. So so sorry, it wasn’t cool. So can he come over? He can’t stop thinking about your body.

What about a personal favorite of mine, he has really grown so much this past year. He’s so thankful for everything, and hopes you are too. He hopes you want to hear about how much he has bettered himself. He knows his path, but he forgot your address, can you send it so he can come in 30 minutes to just hang out and catch up? In bed?

Getting a cute little Snapchat when you’re drinking a glass of wine alone watching a movie that says “ha ha ha ha ha get drunker and send cleavage pics“ should make you throw up in your mouth and hit block. Do it, I dare you. I double dog dare you.

Then hold up your wine tumbler that keeps the rosé cold and cheers to how great your cleavage will look in the face of the actual man who loves you, when that happens. SPOILER ALERT: it will happen, and it will happen so good. Cheers to the dirty dirty dirty sex you’ll have with a man you didn’t give it up to until you were exclusive. And fucking cheers to saying goodbye to these losers and waiting for a little thing called true love, baby!

dominoes and Dostoevsky

My god, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?
Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

I feel like I spent the past year setting up dominoes for hours and hours (read: months and months) and now it’s finally time to knock the first domino over and watch everything that I so carefully planned fall into place.

Some things aren’t an explosive firework result, but more like a steady match. Maybe most things. A slow and steady burn yields better results than a wild blaze.

It’s easy to come up with dreams and live them out in your head. But how revolutionary it is to bring them to fruition and see them manifest.

Now, after waiting and plowing and sowing and watering, I feel like I’m seeing the sprouts grow. The foundation was laid, the work is done.

I think I’m going to let myself be excited. Let myself get my hopes up because I worked for it, goddamnit. I worked so hard for so many months and then I got to rest for a bit and now we’re back with new challenges but I’m excited to face them because I know I can. (read: I KNOW I CAN.)

I just finished my to-do list and it’s time to make a new one.

warming my hands on bridges I’ve burnt, and why that’s okay according to Aristotle

I lost a couple friends this past year and I didn’t give a shit.

And I thought,
Am I sad enough about this?

I thought,
Did I really care about those friendships or did I waste my time on people who I shouldn’t have for too long?

I thought,
Am I being heartless?

I thought,
Will people think I’m a bad friend for being honest about not caring that much?

Then I remembered one of my favorite philosophy classes from college about relationships, and how different philosophers have defined them.

Aristotle said there are three types of friendships: one based on utility, one based on pleasure, and one on mutual appreciation of each other’s values.

A friendship based on utility is basically a relationship that lasts as long as you’re both getting something out of it. Like a transaction. Sort of like a coworker who you’re only work friends with for as long as you’re at that job. Once you leave, you don’t see them again and they don’t see you again but you mutually benefitted from being positive to each other while you were at work. Aristotle said this is popular with older people.

A friendship based on pleasure is more emotional and supposed to usually be the shortest relationship. You stay friends for as long as you both enjoy the same thing, and you break up as soon as one person doesn’t.

Aristotle said the pleasure friendship is more common between younger people because as we grow we tend to change our interests and values, so we grow out of pleasure friendships quicker than the other types.

The third type of friendship is based on virtues, and it has the strongest connections and lasts the longest. The best friendships should be based on appreciation of character — not on a transactional (utility or pleasure) value — and shape our lives for the better.

I think this really explains why I wasn’t sad about the friends that I lost this year.

One was a girl who I went out drinking with and talked about guys we were dating. We would meet up and both hop on dating apps and squeal about who we had matched with, who we’d met, and who we were dating for a while, but once I stopped caring about those things we ended up really not having anything else in common. We didn’t even like the same music or shows. Our friendship was a pleasure transaction, and as soon as I stopped using dating apps we stopped being friends.

I ended up not missing her at all as soon as we stopped being friends because she didn’t really add anything else to my life. Our values weren’t the same at all: we couldn’t relate about our jobs, our education level was different, and we had different political views. The death of our friendship was short-lived and unmourned. I actually felt better knowing I didn’t have to talk to her again, because I didn’t want to talk about the same things we used to.

Aristotle said that when you have a friendship based on appreciating each other’s values, the other two types of friendship naturally combine into it, too. Thing of your diehard BFFs that you’ll drive to the airport, invite over to watch 90 Day Fiancé, and help out during a hard time. They’re beneficial and pleasurable, and you also respect and care for them.

I’m extremely thankful for all of my top tier friends and I’m cool with warming my hands on the bridges I’ve burned with my limited time only buddies.

I think a butterfly just flew out of my mouth

I can’t stop thinking about the butterfly thing, where he really said I think a butterfly just flew out of my mouth. And it doesn’t make me feel how it did at all any more, but it is so easy to remember how it used to make me feel. Like I’m watching myself act it out in a little movie.

I remember how much I reread that text over and over and over and over and I could have survived off of just knowing that someone felt that way about anyone. I only need three hours of sleep and a daydream when I feel like that.

Where you keep starting to do something and just forget right in the middle of it because he said he got butterflies from thinking about you so you drop everything and lay on the floor to ground yourself before you go flying into the Milky Way. And every time you pass by a mirror you go !!!! She Knows Something I’m Afraid To Think and you give yourself that little smile and can’t even let your own eyes meet or you’ll lose your grip on gravity yet again.

How strange it is that we can even get to that point. Where all you feel is !!!! and the butterflies in your tummy fly up to your heart and out of your throat and out of your mouth right in the middle of the airport and everyone’s wondering how did a monarch butterfly land right here in Terminal 3? But you hardly even notice because of all the butterflies still trying to make your feet lift right off of the ground so you swallow a thousand times until you feel about 60% certain that everybody can’t tell you’re in Big L.

He sent it from the airport. We weren’t texting before and I didn’t know how to reply. I probably read it a hundred times before I even thought about how to answer and the funny thing is I can’t remember how I answered at all. Some memories are like that. I remember exactly how I felt and how I pictured him sending the message and how it made me feel for the longest time, but I don’t know what I said back. Probably something mediocre because how can you beat a lyricist at the word game and in general I never know what to say just that I feel too much of it.

The picture is from Jude Guench, from a short story called The Butterfly Eater. I feel it is much more appropriate to how I feel now and in a way I feel like our stories parallel each other’s.

compatibility + obsession = love?

Last night I sat and talked with a very old friend of mine for hours. We talked about love, and contemplated whether the kind of love that hopeless romantics like us look for is even real. Is the formula for love compatibility + infatuation? I think I have only ever felt one, or the other, and finding a combination of those seems impossible. But at the same time it’s everywhere; it’s in every book I’ve ever read, it’s what I see when I look at my parents’ relationship.

I once said that I was a closet hopeless romantic. My friend responded by saying:

“Oh my god. You are the most out of the closet hopeless romantic. You are literally running in the streets screaming through a megaphone letting everybody know exactly who you are at all times.”

I am a goal-oriented person. I make goals and then I obsess completely about them until they are reached. I am like a tiny little ant lifting a crumb to bring to the queen. Goal. Goal. Goal. This is a very good way to be when it comes to my career.

One of my biggest goals is to fall in love, but you can’t will yourself into love or set aside some time to do so. I don’t think that the heart really takes your goals under consideration. Hearts are very inconsiderate things.

There will never be a right time, but I think that there is a right person. You just have to find that compatibility and then become infatuated with them (or vice versa), and exist in that state forever. Sounds easy, right?

With dating apps it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that you decide when you get to fall in love, but I just don’t know if that’s how it really works.

I still hope that I’ll meet someone at a party, and he’ll say he couldn’t stop staring at me from across the room. Or at a coffee shop, where he asks “is this seat taken?” and we begin a deep conversation. Or I’m in my favorite book store, and he will compliment my impeccable taste in literature and fall in love with me.

it’s weird that they say hopeless romantics when it’s just the opposite. I’m so full of hope for romance, and I’m so happy that it exists. I just want a taste of it for my own.