The Anti-love Encounter

He looks into your eyes and tells you he loves you. Oh. Shit.

You were not looking for love. You were not looking for a crush. You just wanted... you wanted someone to make the day feel less boring. And now he had to go off and fall in love with you. Oh. Shit.

With a hasty pay of the tab and an elegantly maneuvered call of the cab, you leave the scene emotionally unscathed. And he is too. But maybe not for long. You have to end it. That night, you don't get a wink of sleep. This is an impossible situation; you can't avoid him because you wouldn't dare hurt him, you can't tell the truth because confrontation is it's own kind of hell, and you can't lie to him because honesty slips your lips like the atom bomb slips Hiroshima's atmosphere. What on Earth can you do now?

Flustered, you take out your phone and begin to partake in the ever-numbing ritual of social media scrolling. Perhaps silly Tiktoks and unattainable examples of human beauty will solve your problems! Glancing through your requests, you see yet another impossibly perfect human. You went to high school with her. Sweet, funny, beautiful, smart, athletic: you hated her. Grumpily, you click on her latest post. Leaving for a trip. To a small, impoverished island in the Caribbean. No running water, no power or reception, working fourteen hours a day on a field growing crops to support the local farmers. This woman is a damn saint. You wonder if you could ever reach that far into your heart to care for strangers like that... never. Never in a million years would you trade the ability to praise others for doing something like this and feeling good about it than to actually do it yourself. No way. Except... He's not on the island. He is nowhere near the island. He's here. And if you go there you won't be here. This is your new option! He would question a change of phone number or a mysterious business trip but this. This would have pictures and proof and no-one would take this as a decision on a whim. Why the hell would anyone fly out into the middle of the Caribbean to work in horrible living conditions for charity just to avoid emotional conflict? Who would actually be that crazy? You decide to give that preppy classmate of yours a call.

So you couldn't get a spot on the plane. No big deal! You know what they say, if it ain't meant to be, you must just have to find another way to get there! So you call the bus station and, miraculously, they have no room either. You try to convince them that you're very small and very nimble and if they just allowed another large suitcase to be strapped to the top of the bus, you were sure you could figure something out. But no, the bus was another not-meant-to-be. Even more miraculously, your car won't start and there was no possible way to take it cross-country. Incredibly, car rental places are on strike that very same day. You guess the fates really think that you should get creative to get to this island. So you hitchhike. You hitchhike to Florida and you take a boat. You pick up quite a few stories along the way. Meet man named Hoogleton, learn that you actually can get your way out of a Chinese finger trap, play the didgeridoo, get a sailor tattoo, and much more. A quick boat ride with a brief swim into the island (the swell was too big that day for the boat to actually get close enough) and you finally reach your meant-to-be.

The island! You're here! What was its name again? You'll figure it out. Most of the time you relied on him to figure that kind of stuff out. He loved remembering things so you didn't have to. He hated volunteering, but when you told him you were doing it, he supported you all the way. Ironic that you hated it too. He supported just about everything you did. That's what love is, you guess. Poor guy. But he isn't so perfect. His laugh is incredibly annoying. He hates dogs and burns the brownies every time he bakes them. You always ended up buying the store bought sweets which was okay with you: you liked them just as much. But you did love watching him suffer. You asked for homemade brownies nearly every time you came to his place.

Walking to your housing "beneath the stars" (meaning shelter without walls), you find your former classmate, Miss Perfect. Curious, you ask her why she came all the way out here. You hope she tells you some painfully inspiring story about the common good that makes you feel slightly better about this whole adventure, but she surprises you. She tells you that she was lonely back home, and that she didn't have anyone in her life that made it interesting. With all the perfection in the world, she couldn't find a person to share all of those virtuous qualities with. You think about it, and you ask her if she shared her faults. (She had to have at least one, you know.) You wonder if she shared all of her dumb, crazy anxieties and stupid, embarrassing stories. She told you that you were right, and that she still wasn't perfect and she needed to be a truly ugly person with someone just as ugly as her. Whatever that means. So the perfect person escapes to a remote island to find love, and you turn hell upside-down to get to the same island to run from it. He was pretty ugly. He was a terrible person. He was just as crazy as you were; he was crazy enough to tell you he loved you. And you start to feel like you may be crazy enough to tell him you love him back. And now, dammit, you had find a way to get the hell off of this island.