Two further years have elapsed since my last retirement post. For the most part, I was never truly retired from Bachelor City. Saturday, November 20, 2010 merely marked the day I woefully admitted that I needed somebody – that my right hand was no substitute for a woman, no matter how pretty a face I drew on my palm.
I pondered in that post upon the fruits of singledom and concluded that ‘even the sweetest of fruits grow bitter in time… and no doubt rot…‘ and in the many months that followed my proclamation of retirement, the feeling of loneliness was rotten indeed. At some indeterminate point in time ‘post-confession’, singledom, or bachelorhood if you will, became synonymous with loneliness rather than ‘license to fart whenever you want’.
Yet I continued to be a bachelor. I struggled to reconcile my acknowledgement of needing somebody, with my confidence in my own emotional independence. I knew that I needed somebody, but believed that I did not. My inner conflict was paradoxical. There was no resolution insofar as I desired to reconcile these two mutually exclusive notions. Something had to give, and for a while, my confidence triumphed.
Timing is a funny thing. For most of my life it has conspired against me. Familial issues before an exam period. Check. Missing the train by five seconds. Check. Needing to pee when you can’t find any coins for the parking meter but are too scared to move away from your car lest there’s a parking inspector right around the corner. Check. But in a fleeting moment so brief as to warrant an analogy with a solar eclipse, timing offered me benevolence.
On an evening late in December 2011, my confidence faltered. The stars must have been in perfect alignment for, as timing would have it, I found somebody that very evening. It is said that the fray of war can bring gain or danger (Sun Tzu, The Art of War). In the fray of my internal war I was in danger of emerging an irreparably bitter individual. Instead, I found my savior from bitterness.
So I retire. Truly.
Indeed this would not be a quintessential ‘wanker’ post without some form of petulance… so I note my utter detest in my inability to carry myself naturally around her… whether or not this is in fact a desirable thing is outside the scope of my current concerns… but I digress. She is a sweet little thing and I see in her a myriad of virtues than she fails to see in herself. She does me more good than she can ever hope to imagine. There is no impetus for me to return. Wanker signing out indefinitely.
