Date

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.

And make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away,

Sneak up and engage her in unsentimental trivialities,

Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly

Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome,

Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlight,

Because you’ve seen it in a film.

Let that 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.

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, drop down, 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,

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,

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,

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.

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,

She lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the spacious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her,

And the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much.

A vocabulary, Oh God, that makes my vacuous sophistry nothing

………………but a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax.

Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness comes in sporadic but knowable moments.

She senses those irregular pauses

 – the hesitation of breath – endemic to a lie,

and she has decided that she is an ellipsis and not a period.

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 story tellers.

She 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,

you….who make my life so damned difficult!

But I am weak and I will fail you.

Because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is much better than I am...

You will not accept the life of which I spoke of in the beginning of this rant…

You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worth being told.

So, OUT with you, girl who reads.

Take the next out-of-town bus

And take your oxford with you

Or

Perhaps,

Stay…………………

Girl who reads, stay

And save my life

From one of nothingness.