Got an e-mail saying I had a new private message. Went to the site and logged in. Different person than I was expecting. Beautiful girl, profile that clicked with me, an invitation in the message to e-mail her. I respond back within about 20 minutes. I lay down in bed, a smile and thought intertwined, standing proud against a whole mass of experience that would have suggested, “Since when do people contact me on a dating site?”
My thoughts wander, I finally feel as if my fortune has changed.
I check back a few times in excitement, re-reading the profile, clicking the button over and over again. I look at the profile once more and it seems like a perfect fit. Still no response. Still excited and happy, confident. But something rises up to the surface.
Doubt. I entertain doubt. I take her e-mail address and I put it into Google.
One of 400 known e-mail addresses for spam.
In the distance, I hear someone trampling on flesh.
Re-reading the profile and re-checking my e-mail now has a different feel.
It hurts beyond comprehension, that the only people willing to message me on any of the dating sites or engage with me in conversation, the ones who seemed to express interest from the outset are just scams. Last time, it was a South African girl trying to get me to call a premium UK number. The times before, random e-mails from Russian girls. Scams to check websites, scams on Gumtree.
I’m sitting in this terminal called loneliness, every flight is not for me, every person offering a seat with them on their flight, and they’re doing it to cheat me in some way. I end up running away, trying new gates, sitting in different cafes, checking my tickets, getting ready for the flight, but the flight never comes.
It’s a terminal for terminally lonely. It’s a safehouse for the easily led and manipulated.
I worked hard on the profiles I put up recently, went out on a limb, put pictures from the start, only messaged the ones I really liked.
I just have to remember now to run a check on every e-mail address I get on a dating site, to never trust or assume the person who contacted me to be genuine in any way, and to stay in that one chair, in that terminal.
