the friday sads

I have the Friday sads. I get them more and more. It's close to Christmas now. Holiday cheer, couples shopping, children, smiles, conversation, me, nothing. Any time the weekend nears I look forward to the time off and then I dread the possibility I'll try to go into some unscripted setting, a room, a well-lit store, a bar, and see others, single, many younger than me, milling about, swiping the glowing rectangle, laughing in pairs, smiling, together. Me, alone. I work my ass off. I work so fucking hard. I build pride out of a stubborn job, a solitary job, left to myself, working alone, trying not to ask for help. At 38, I settled into working hard to make a family, saving money, buying a reliable and new car. That part is easy. It's the meeting and deciding that's so damn hard. Five years in and I run from anything that nears closeness. I sabotage any budding relationship that shows itself. I sleep alone. I talk to myself. I make it through the week and there's Friday, and I get the sads. I know I'll do it again and again, constantly trying and discarding people I meet, and most of it happens because I lack the confidence or the content to converse about normal things. I get so self-conscious. She's smiling at me. What do I do? I smile back. Again and again, but I never say much more than 'hello,' and her smile slowly becomes a frown, then she ignores me altogether. It's over again. They all end the same way. I react the same way, fear, rationalizing, avoidance, nervousness, and the charade ends again. Many arrive. All leave angry, rejected, hating me a little, me hating me a little. It's over again. Now you're alone, alone. No one looking your way anymore, a phantom. You don't exist. Maybe you never did. It's all so contingent upon that first thirty seconds, and you manage to fight through about 15, maybe 20 seconds, and all you can think is to not get too flirty. No, that's sexist. You manage your sex life as if you were a houseplant. Planted in dirt. Stationary. Blooming and dying off, over and over again. 

Sad. I could have been a dad by now. I could have put a kid through to his adulthood by now. I could have loved and lost, grown together, fought, made up, promised, broken, kept secrets, told the truth, figured things out most importantly, TOGETHER. Nope. I did it alone. All through my 20s, into my thirties, rounding the bend in my forties, that dream recedes upon a mental horizon. Now, age-related barriers arise. Physical deterioration begins. Life begins to look different. Most of it is behind me now. Sad. It's Friday. The dark is closing in. I sit washed, fed, ready, and no confidence in leaving the house, being seen, interacting, small talk. I have none of this. It's gone. I fill my head with wikipedia entries, physics videos, science stunts, and various tidbits of history. I watch a scorpion sting a rat. I see it convulse and die, a metaphor for my social life. I have the Friday sads.