Step 1:

The ground around here is saturated, but the hair on my head is dry as straw. I should go and get it cut, but the only hairdresser in town intimidates me, so I leave it limp and box-dyed with split ends hanging lower than they have in a decade.

I should have used more conditioner.

Step 2:

I can’t even shave my legs, because to even point a razor in the direction of the topographic map of itchy, pink mosquito-borne welts that passes for skin from my thighs down would be to invite a half dozen Krakatoas to burst their aggravated peaks, running lava-blood races down my calves. (They’re already doing that enough, purely thanks to my constant unconscious scratching.)

In an unexpected boon, however: I have gotten surprisingly good at smashing the life out of those bloodsucking little bitches mid-air, so at least my hand-eye coordination is improving.

Step 3:

Spend far too much of the money you were meant to be saving on stockings and suspender belts, only to find that your legs really are the wrong shape for that style, and after all, they’re too sheer to wear on unshaved legs, and we already know how well that crusade is going.

Step 4:

One thing I doubt I will ever learn is How Not To Lust After Incredibly Interesting and Attractive (And Thus Utterly Unattainable) Men, minoring in Especially If they Live 100’s of Kilometres or More Away.

Here is another night spent annoying my dog with the sound of my fanticising about someone so far out of my league that we’re basically playing entirely different sports, while I simultaneously wish he were just a little or a lot less handsome so I could stop worrying that the desire for friendship might be driven entirely by lustiness and hopeless romanticism instead of a genuine interest in the actual human being in question.

How can it be that someone so incredibly besotted with the notion of Happily Ever After-style love can be so utterly bewildered by the idea that it could ever fit in her own brain? That the feeling of warmth and hope for a special person’s future could comfortably reside with a physical attraction and be reciprocated? Sir, I am pretty damn certain that triangle is only permitted two corners in this story.

In conclusion, god damn it, I want to fuck him so bad, but also get to know him, but I’m pretty sure my fate is just to be a weird spinster with a dog.

Also: if you want high quality, ethical porn, you ned to pay for it.

Step 5:

Be isolated. Notice that the last time you felt human touch was when you hugged your mum goodbye weeks ago, and with all the roads out of town closed, you have no idea when you will again. Worry that you’re forgetting how to be intimate, or even just how it feels. You Stress that you don’t mean “intimacy” in a sexual sense, but rather that aura of cosiness shared with another human being where you feel like they might actually be able to see you, like a dust particulae in the thinnest ray of sunlight. Ache from the loss of it, grieving to the point where you could cry, and you desperately want to, but the path your tears would take stays dry, because there’s no water left to fall from your eyes.

It’s all in the river.