Single State of Mind

by Andi Dorfman

Ava takes a big gulp of wine as I sit back in my seat and prepare my listening ears. And then she begins telling the all-too-familiar story about a guy she met while vacationing in Europe, who she thought had the potential to be “the one.” They’d exchanged kisses and numbers and had been talking for weeks, until suddenly he just stopped texting back.

  “So what is the status now? ”

  “Well, funny you should ask.”

  Oh, God, here comes the part where shit is about to go south.

  “He asked me to come visit him in London, but I don’t know if I should.”

  “Why wouldn’t you? ” I ask.

  “Well, so we were talking every single day, but he hasn’t responded to any of my texts for the past week.”

  “Week? ”

  Jess kicks me under the table.

  “Sorry, that’s just a long time.”

  “Yeah, I know. And now I don’t know whether to book the flight or not.”

  “Hell, no!” I blurt out.

  “But I really like him, and I think, honestly, he’s just busy with school and getting back into the swing of things. I’m sure he is just busy.”

  I’m trying not to laugh at the idea of him starting up a new semester of college, while at the same time trying not to reach across the table and choke Ava out of her own delusions. I want to tell her to wake the fuck up, that this dude met her over the summer at a club and now he’s back at school, which means he is probably back to sneaking chicks into his dorm and waking up next to them in his twin bunk bed. But I can’t.

  Neither can Jess. Instead, we just sit with strained smiles on our faces and listen to Ava say, “I just wish I knew what he was up to.”

  “Why don’t you stalk him on Instagram? ” I suggest.

  “Well, I do. He has stories up that I want to see, but—”

  Before Ava can finish, Jess protectively interjects, “Wait! You know that he can see when you view his story now, right? ”

  “Y’all, that’s why you have a fake account, duh,” I say.

  They both look at me with those girl-you-batshit-crazy side eyes.

  “So what if I have a fake Instagram account? It’s 2016, and I would like to stalk my exes in privacy, thank you very much.”

  Both of them are dying to see my account. I whip out my phone and show them.

  “JerseyJulie89, are you fucking kidding me? ” Jess is in awe.

  “Well, it was either that or MandaPanda92.” I laugh.

  “Okay, you might be a little crazy,” Ava says, “but also, you might be a little genius.”

  I hand the phone over to Ava so she can click on his story. There’s nothing incriminating, but I group-text my account name and password to the two of them for future use.

  “Well, I think it is very romantic and exciting. It’ll probably be a bit of an adjustment, so maybe just keep your cool and see how it goes,” Jess suggests.

  I agree.

  “Okay, just one last thing, and then I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Should I say something to him about going all MIA on me? ”

  “No!” Jess and I both shout in unison.

  “Okay, I’ll hold off and keep you guys updated.”

  I can’t help but think how dumb Ava looks. Doesn’t she know she’s getting played? I know I’m probably channeling my own frustrations with Mr. Seattle. Why is it that, as women, we play up these romantic studs who are really just shallow duds? Our eyes light up when we talk about our flings to our girlfriends. We blush at the sight of their names appearing on our phones. And then, when they go missing on us, we make excuses for them. We say, “He’s probably just busy,” or “This is what long-distance dating is like,” or some other bullshit excuse. When it’s our girlfriend, we listen and hide our eye rolls and agree with the excuses. We lie because we don’t have the heart to tell our friend that her romantic fairy tale has been hijacked by reality. We lie because we can’t bear to see the look of disappointment on her face. But by lying, are we protecting her, or are we just hanging her out to dry?

  Deep down, we all know when a man isn’t into us. It’s not that difficult to tell, given that men aren’t smart enough to play real games with our heads, nor are they disciplined enough to leave something they want alone. Basically, it’s as simple as this: man sees something man likes, man goes and gets it. Men are like fat kids in bakeries: they will beg and do whatever it takes to get the cake, but once they’ve had a few bites, they will put down the fork and walk away, never to return again. Screw the “I’m busy” excuses. It takes all of two seconds to send a text. If a man has time to take a shit, he has time to shoot a text. Note: I am a firm believer that the only time a man can successfully multitask is while he is on the toilet. And yet knowing this, somehow we women still find ourselves stuck in the same shitty situation (pun intended) that Ava is in. Dammit, I should have just bitten the bullet and told her the truth. But I wonder if it would have even mattered. When it comes to a man being over us, is the hardest part knowing it or accepting it?

  “Well, in case anyone was wondering, my love life is so non-existent that I’ve officially booked an appointment to see about freezing my eggs.” Jess takes a sip of wine in defeat.

  “Reaaaallly? ” First Sarah, now Jess.

  “Yup, time to face the reality, ladies.”

  We finish brunch and head our separate ways. I’m walking home thinking about what Jess said. Holy shit, has Sarah been right this whole time? I used to think she was joking about having to freeze her eggs, but now that Jess is doing it, it seems a little more valid. Have I been living in denial about my age? Should I be freezing my eggs, too? If my friends are all doing it, should I?

  I decide to look into this whole egg-freezing thing and call the one person I know who can answer all my questions and debunk the online horror stories you read when you google “egg freezing.” It’s my friend Whitney, a fertility nurse in Chicago.

  I shoot her a text saying, “Hey, girl, hope all is well. I have a question about freezing my eggs.”

  Immediately, she calls me. “Please tell me you are serious!”

  “I don’t know, should I do it? ”

  “Absolutely!” She starts telling me what a great idea it is to do it while I’m still young. Then she starts telling me about the process. First, I’d have to get an ultrasound to get an initial assessment of my ovaries, and then I’d start hormone injections, and then, once the eggs are ready, I’d have them retrieved by a doctor. She makes it sound so simple.

  “How long does it take? ”

  “Well, that depends on how regular your cycle is. You’re on birth control, right? ”

  “Umm, no.”

  “Really? What do you do? ”

  “Condoms.”

  She laughs before telling me that I’d need to go on birth control for about four to six weeks to regulate my cycle. Once it’s regulated, I would be able to start the injection process. She asks me how I feel about it now that she’s thrown a heaping pile of information my way, and I tell her I’m intrigued but just not sure and am only asking because it’s been brought up by my girlfriends a few times.

  “Totally understand. Well, you know I’m here whenever you do want to do it. I can answer any of your questions, and we are actually about to open a new clinic here in Chicago called Ova that is going to be awesome. It will be a facility we use only for egg freezing.”

  I thank her and tell her I will think about it.

  I hang up the phone and feel relieved to know that it is not as intense as Sarah makes it out to be. But in all honesty, I don’t feel like I need to completely surrender my ovaries just yet. I mean, I’m twenty-nine; that isn’t that old. Sure, by Southern standards, I probably should have had a few kids by now, but I feel like freezing your eggs, quite frankly, is something only old women do. And I refuse to admit that I am old. I’ve still got it, haven’t I?

  my suspicions have been confirmed

  With my hunt still under way a
nd absolutely nothing to show for it, I find myself on the Upper East Side having dinner at a new ramen restaurant with Jess. We haven’t even gotten our food when a strange look comes across Jess’s face.

  “Okay, so I have to tell you something.”

  “Oh, God, what? ”

  “I got the scoop.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” I don’t even need to ask what the scoop is about.

  She takes a deep breath. “He and his girlfriend . . .”

  I go numb. I knew it. I fucking knew it. I knew there was no way Mr. Seattle was telling me the truth when he said he just wanted to be single. None of it made sense, none of it.

  “How did you find this out? ”

  She goes on to tell me that one of her mutual friends is good friends with his new girlfriend. Apparently, three days after I left Seattle, he was out to dinner with his friends and met a girl he is now officially dating. In fact, he’s already asked her to move in with him.

  “She knows about you, and your email, all of it. Apparently, the girl is nice. Not a threatening type of girl, just a simple, nice one.”

  It’s all making sense to me. The whole “I just want to be single” line, the silent treatment. Total bullshit. He’s not lost, like he said he was. Oh, no, he has very much found his way—into the arms of another woman. Of course she’s younger and blond.

  “Wait! Three days after I left would have been a Thursday. Which was the night he didn’t text me. The night before the epic text breakup on Friday. Oh, my God.”

  Jess feels awful for having to deliver the bad news, but she did the right thing. Truth is, I wouldn’t want to hear this news from anyone other than her. After all, we’re the bury the body team; the duo that cries together in the bathroom stall. After dinner I rode the train home in a daze; I took a seat on a greasy blue chair near the end of the car and looked around at the sudden emptiness. A man was singing “Sunshine, go away today, I don’t feel much like dancing” while holding a cup filled with change. I dug through my purse and gave him a dollar, and then I just started crying.

  I wasn’t hysterical, but I wasn’t just whimpering. I was having the kind of cry you have when you watch a tearjerker movie. A silent, steady stream kind of cry.

  You’d think by now I’d be over Mr. Seattle, that I wouldn’t give a shit that what I had grown to suspect all along turned out to be true. Hell, I thought by now I’d be over him. An entire summer and half a winter has passed since I last spoke to him. But even though the seasons have changed, the number of times I think of him hasn’t.

  He’s the one man from my past who still haunts me. He isn’t the best, certainly not the hottest, definitely not the tallest. And even with the fat paycheck he now has, he isn’t the richest. But out of all the men I’ve been with, it seems as though the below-average Mr. Seattle is the one man who has me crying on a subway train.

  It’s not until I’m lying in bed that my dazed tears turn into irate ones. I cannot believe that he lied to me. I cannot believe that he has a fucking girlfriend! All of his crying on FaceTime was complete bullshit. The email—oh, God! Why the fuck did I write that email? And he showed it to her? What an asshole. But wait, why would he tell me that he just wanted to be single when he was already seeing her at the time? Why didn’t he just tell the truth and say he’d met someone else? That’s what pisses me off about this entire situation—more than the mortification, the time wasted, the feelings hurt. It’s the lying. Don’t feed me bullshit lines like “I care about you so much, but I just want to be single,” when clearly you don’t. Don’t pretend to care when you have your dick in someone else. Don’t be a coward.

  Sure, maybe he didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but he had to have known I was going to find out sooner or later. And you go around this world doing do fucked-up shit and then cover it with “But I didn’t want to hurt your feelings” just to justify the fucked-up shit you do. And I’m sorry, but getting into a relationship is automatically risking getting your feelings hurt. If you can’t handle being hurt or hurting someone else, then don’t get involved in the first place. I’m a grown woman. I can handle getting let down. I can handle some rejection. But at least do it with class. At least be a fucking man and be honest.

  And I’m not just hurt, I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed in someone I cared about as a human being. Disappointed at him for being a lying coward and at myself for believing he was different. It’s as if he is the child and I am the parent and he has done something bad, but instead of being angry, I am just disappointed, which I think is actually worse. I thought better of him, I really did. I let someone in who had the ability to hurt me yet again. And that’s exactly what he did.

  But why? Why did this happen?

  Ava says I was too nice to him both during the relationship and after. And that I was too open with my feelings for him. The player in me agrees, but the woman in me knows that’s just who I am, which makes it a bit of a Catch-22. On the one hand, I acted as my true self, and I take comfort in that. There is a peace in being able to say to myself that at least he got to see the real me, but it also comes with the other side, which means he didn’t really like the real me. Not enough, at least. And that’s a tough pill to swallow for anyone.

  Maybe I’ll never really know why he chose her over me, or why he lied, or why she could make him ready but I couldn’t. Maybe never knowing is my answer. Maybe the outcome is my only closure.

  All of this leads me to one terrifying realization: you will never truly know anyone other than yourself. You won’t. No matter how much you think you know someone, think you know who they are at their core, what they stand for, their character, their values, all of it, you don’t. They can betray you in an instant, and there is nothing you can do about it. They can make you believe this yet prove that. They can discard you like trash. When it comes down to it, there is only one person you can truly ever trust, and it’s not a man, it’s not a friend, it’s not your family. It’s you. And as I lie in bed I am faced with the rude awakening that I might be alone forever. And if that’s the case then I need to start preparing myself for that.

  The next morning, still fuming, I pick up the phone.

  “Hey, girl! What’s up? ”

  “Whitney, I want to freeze my eggs!”

  Within the week Whitney has flown in from Chicago just to teach me how to do the injections myself. The two of us sat on my couch for about twenty minutes as she went over all the different medicines and how to fill the syringes with them. Though I don’t really need to know everything just yet, since I won’t be starting the injections for another week or so, but she wants me to feel comfortable since I won’t be in Chicago until the week of my retrieval. After showing me how the syringes get filled, she takes out a medical sponge thingy and puts it on my coffee table. It looks like a silicone boob, if you ask me, but she tells me it’s a device they use to practice giving shots. I practice each step she has taught me before taking the needle and effortlessly sticking it into the booby sponge.

  “Great! Now it’s time to try it on yourself.”

  “Umm, really? ”

  “Yeah. Here is a vial of distilled water. We can use that.”

  I take my shirt off and bend over, grabbing a good-size pinch of the fat that surrounds my belly.

  “Okay, now, take the sanitizing wipe and rub the area where you are going to inject yourself.” She points to an area on my belly as she reminds me that it needs to be at least two fingers away from the belly button. “The lower, the better, and the fattier, the less painful,” she says.

  I take a deep breath in and exhale. I’ve got the needle filled with the distilled water in one hand and a pinch full of my own belly fat in the other. I’m ready. I can do this. The needle is tiny, smaller than a safety pin. Good analogy, Andi. Think of this as popping a pimple with a safety pin. I can do this! I inch the needle to the surface of my skin and close my eyes.

  Seconds later, with my eyes still closed, I ask Whitney if it�
�s in.

  She laughs. “Not even close.”

  I press a little harder and ask her again.

  She laughs again. “Still not even close.”

  This goes back and forth for a solid five minutes and has us both hysterically laughing.

  I take another deep breath in and press harder. “Okay, this has to fucking be in now!” I shout.

  “Just a touch more.”

  I push harder.

  “There you go! It’s in.”

  I stand up, raising both arms in a show of victory.

  “Nooooooo!” Whitney screams. “Keep the needle in your hand!”

  Oh, God, there is a needle sticking out of my stomach. I forgot I still had to inject the distilled water. “Fuuuuuck.”

  “You can do it.”

  A few deep breaths later, I do. For the first time in my life, I have taken . . . a shot of water.

  The next day, I walk to the pharmacy, where I proudly pick up the pack of birth control Whitney prescribed me even though I won’t be using it for another month or so. Apparently there is this whole scheduling of the menstrual cycle ovulation thingy that goes along with freezing your eggs. You don’t just walk into the doctor’s office and voilà have your eggs frozen. They have to put you on a schedule, and mine will take a little longer since my body is not “trained” to cycle, blah, blah, blah.

  As soon as I enter my apartment, I rip open the paper bag and pull out one small yellow plastic compact case. It reminds me of one of those Polly Pocket toys my sister and I used to play with when we were kids. Only it’s not filled with plastic accessories, it’s filled with a foil tray of little blue and green pills. I feel weirdly proud of my Polly Pocket of birth control. I text the girls a photo of it. I’m bragging like I’m thirteen years old again and getting my period for the first time.

  Oh shit, is this going to make me fat?

  i’m playing with fire

  ’Tis the season . . to schedule your eggs to be frozen and to play with some fire! The weekend starts out with a holiday party hosted by a group of our guy friends. They are the kind of New York City guys who know how to throw a good party and surround themselves with a bevy of young, hot models. And while this isn’t so uncommon in the city, the fact that they are barely above-average-looking makes me scratch my head every time I see them with these women. I don’t know how they do it, but they do. Jess and I are two of the handful of nonmodels on the guest list. Knowing the competition will be fierce, I get a blow-out, slather on the baby oil, watch a YouTube video to nail my best smoky eye ever, and complete my sexy ensemble with a plunging black jumpsuit. When I meet Jess for a drink before the party, she is equally glammed up. We both know what we are stepping into, and dammit, we are going to step in looking hot.