I’m taking a day off from the other story because I need to really think about how bad things get for them and how they’re getting out of them, and I need to get this next chapbook in order so that I can send the files to the artist and have him do some drawing. Fortunately this project is almost ready for beta readers…
(The original can be read here.)
I gave it a day before I started messing with the app. I could say that I felt something ominous about it, even then, but that’s not true at all. What actually happened was that I decided to try one more time on my own, because it was Friday night and that’s when people were hot to trot, right?
Well, not really. It’s not that I was rejected; it was that I was never in a place where rejection was even an option. It’s like… everybody belongs to these bubbles, right? And if you’re in one bubble and somebody’s in another one, you can’t do much about it. Sure, you can talk, share information, even be friendly; but there’s not gonna be any kind of connection — which is to say, sex.
I don’t want anybody to think I was mad at other people about this. There wasn’t any big conspiracy to keep me in my own private bubble. It had just worked out that way. And nobody was obligated to join me in my bubble, either. I wasn’t resentful, just lonely in a complicated way. Hell, getting laid might not even help — but I was willing to give it a shot anyway. So, the next afternoon I began the new and exciting journey of trying to look good in what was a glorified database entry.