Missing The Point

“Good bye, Charlie…” Her voice faded away as the beautiful woman disappeared into a misty distance. She was the last of a long line of different, desirable women who had done the same thing, said the same thing, tugged at his heart in the same way as she walked away, vanishing into a dark, murky valley that stretched away out of sight. He had reached out to each one, begging them to stay. But, with a murmured word of thanks, they had all turned away.

With some, he was aware of the faint scent of some pleasant perfume. He felt the soft touch of their fingers as they slid from his hand, but in the end they had all slipped away. He sensed reluctance, sadness, with several of them, but he could not convince any of them to turn back. It began to feel, in an increasingly overwhelming way, as though it was his very life that was slipping away, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

Then the beautiful women were gone, and the valley was closing in on

him. Suddenly he was lying on his back in a shadowy pit struggling with cords that cut into his ankles and wrists. His frantic efforts at escape were futile. His despair finally gave rise to an agonized, “Nooooooo…”

The early light of dawn was filtering into his bedroom as he sat bolt upright in bed. The panic gradually faded away, along with those beautiful women, off into that dark valley, but the apprehension remained. Now, in his own little apartment, he realized that his life really was taking a turn for the worse. The adventure, which was supposed to have been exciting, contained some pitfalls which were threatening, even now, to swallow him up.

This was not the way it was supposed to work. He had planned so well, had been so careful. How could it have gone so wrong that his subconscious was wrestling with it while he slept?

He lay back to consider his fate as the encroaching morning light moved shadows across the ceiling. It had all seemed so uncomplicated, so obvious, at the start. He remembered his enthusiastic beginning as though it was yesterday, although it now seemed like ages ago.

He was an almost obsessive reader of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s personal ad section, which seemed to him to be a microcosm of the best and worst of human relationships. With a master’s degree in sociology, he always read the ads with an air of mockery and bemused superiority. As a result, he could hardly believe what he was contemplating, as he came to the end of another column, which he had read in an absentminded way, his thoughts somewhere else.

People fascinated him, which was probably why he had chosen social work as a career. He was constantly interested in and often amused by them, although shades of cynicism were creeping into the picture since his heart-wrenching divorce three years earlier. He was intrigued by how people thought, why they did things, and especially by the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, but he could hardly imagine that people could stoop so low as to use the impersonal medium of personal ads in their pursuit of a relationship.

He found it hard to fathom who would write such ads or who would answer them. He always subconsciously wondered if the ads were real or if they were just a fantasy, some hopeful fishing expedition to see if anyone would bite so the fantasy could be pursued. Or perhaps the whole section was just meant to be entertainment. It was, after all, usually attached to that portion of the paper.

There was at least a semblance of reality in some of the ads. These were the ordinary “looking for a relationship” ads, as though you could really find your soul mate, the love of your life, with whom you’d share the deepest elements of your being, through a two line ad in the local newspaper. Sometimes it struck him as being similar to shopping for furniture for your new house by driving the streets of the city, checking out what people had put out by the curb, hoping someone would take it away. What were people thinking? Were they really thinking at all?

Pondering along these lines always made him wonder, “What have we come to? or been reduced to? if what began as a whim, perhaps a joke, has become the accepted, almost normal means of finding a mate? Don’t people have friends anymore? Grow up in a neighborhood? Go to church? Notice the people at work? Don’t people have match-making parents or friends anymore? What has this world come to, when there don’t seem to be enough normal ways to meet potential life partners, so people have to resort to putting ads in the paper?”

And these were only the “ordinary” ads. Then there were the others, often inexplicable to him. And all the new designations indicated by an amazing array of capitalized abbreviations – straight, gay, bi, tri, poly, etc, etc. – were more than he could comprehend.

And yet now he was contemplating writing his own. Charlie Stevens, superior mocker, was considering trying his hand at this most unusual of human games, his own fishing expedition, ready to find out for himself whether or not it was all just fantasy.