date a girl who does not read...

Date a girl who doesn’t read...

Find her in the weary squalor of a downtown 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 in 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 streetlight,

Because you’ve seen it in a film,

Remark at its insignificance.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship,

Find shared interests and common ground like swimming and 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 freaking shower doors need to be closed so that they don’t 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 in a way-too-expensive restaurant far beyond your means,

Make sure the ambiance is cool, calm, and sweet with a gentle tune playing in the background.

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 the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster,

Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through the window and into oncoming traffic,

 

For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel 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 regularly,

Lapse into bored indifference,

Lapse into indifferent sadness

Have a midlife 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 too, one day, will die,

With only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do these things,...