Date a girl who
doesn't read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find
her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale
nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling.
Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look
away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and
laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome.
Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the
weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. Remark at
its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with
making love. Fuck her.
Let the anxious contract you've
unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship.
Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music.
Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat
into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk
about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass
unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about
inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be
closed so that it doesn't fucking collect mold. Let a year pass
unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get
married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her
to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your
means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a
waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When
she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity
you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap
through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly
concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it
stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she
doesn't, smile all the same.
Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a
career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to
raise them well. Fail frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse
into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder
at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant
and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if
you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but
only after you observe that the girl who didn't read never made your
heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the
story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and
tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.
Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl
who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a
life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary
that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a
vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an
accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays
claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and
soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate
desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit,
that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.
Do it, because a
girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that
moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl
who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands,
that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who
has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of
breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference
between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of
someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of
reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said
a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a
period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence
of a life well lived.
Date a girl who doesn't read because the
girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the
demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels
them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an
intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who
reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is
comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with
only a twinge of sadness.
Don’t date a girl who reads because
girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the
Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform
of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your
room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads
has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning.
She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful,
and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be
everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you
have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will
not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You
will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life
worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next
southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and
save my life.
~Charles Warnke~
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