You should date an illiterate girl.
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
* alternate ending
Source: paint me a palace
